Truth and fiction about Freddie Mercury: Behind the scenes of the film "Bohemian Rhapsody"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

29 years ago, on November 24, 1991, the legendary musician who became a cult person in the art world, Freddie Mercury, passed away. The fact that interest in it has not faded to this day is evidenced by the rental history of the film Bohemian Rhapsody: 2 years ago, its premiere became one of the main and highest-grossing film events, and disputes about it continue to this day. Although the filmmakers chose the biopic genre, which implies following the real facts of the biography, the musician's fans drew attention to the fact that there was a lot of inaccurate, if not completely inaccurate information on the screens.

For the first time the idea of shooting a biopic was expressed by Queen guitarist Brian May back in 2010. The film with the tentative title “Freddie Mercury” was supposed to be released in 2014, but these plans were not destined to come true. The search for an actor for the main role continued for a long time. Initially, the image of Freddie Mercury was supposed to be embodied on the screens by the British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen. However, he planned to present a scandalous interpretation of the image of the musician in the film with an R-rating, which provides for the possibility of demonstrating scenes of the use of illegal drugs, as well as the use of profanity. The producers and members of the Queen group opposed this idea - according to their plan, this film should have been intended for family viewing. Guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor feared that the cynical Cohen would turn the family picture into a provocative parody of Freddie Mercury.

As a result, the comedian left the project, citing "creative differences with the band members." After that, there was a long pause in the work on the film. Cohen admitted that he did not want to hide the truth about the musician, and therefore considered it necessary to talk about his bad habits and orientation. Actor Rami Malek, who eventually got the main role in this film, later said that he was generally satisfied with his work, but admits his interpretation of the singer's image is not complete enough due to the too obvious desire of the producers, colleagues and friends of Freddie Mercury to “ennoble” this image and get around sharp corners, just in passing saying about important things. Malek says about the musician's personal life: "". In his opinion, this would help to reveal the image deeper, to understand his psychology and motives of his actions, and most importantly, to realize the degree of inner freedom that was always felt in everything he did.

Difficulties on the set also arose due to the fact that with the departure of Cohen, director Tom Hooper also left the project. Dexter Fletcher started working instead, but he also refused to participate in the filming due to creative differences. After him came Brian Singer, who was soon dismissed due to delays and conflicts on the site. Then Fletcher returned to the project and finished what he had begun. The fate of the film was very difficult, the work took several years, while the controversy did not subside, but the result exceeded all expectations - even the creators of the biopic did not expect such a box-office success.

In "Bohemian Rhapsody" many details of the real performances of the Queen group are reproduced with documentary accuracy. So, for the stage with a large-scale charity concert "Live Aid" they built a huge set - a copy of the London football stadium in 1985. The group's performance was recreated as accurately as possible: music, Freddie's movements and his air kisses, even glasses with Pepsi standing on the piano, which the singer plays at the beginning of the set.

At the same time, there were certain inaccuracies and obvious fiction - which is absolutely logical for a feature film, even in the biopic genre. The artistic image always implies a certain amount of convention, so this can hardly be considered a miscalculation of the scriptwriters, as they wrote in some publications. Clarification of details was important, rather, not for ordinary viewers, but for the singer's fans, who are well acquainted with the facts of his biography. What were the creators of the film "Bohemian Rhapsody" accused of?

In the film, Freddie Mercury first meets guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor in 1970 during a concert by the band "Smile". In reality, the singer met the members of this group while studying at the College of Art in London and was friends with the soloist Tim Staffell. And when he left "Smile", Freddie was accepted into the team instead of him. And he convinced May and Taylor to change the band's name to Queen.

The situation with the breakup of the group on the screens looked as if this decision was dictated by the personal, somewhat selfish desire of Freddie Mercury to pursue a solo career. Allegedly, he signed a solo contract without warning the other musicians of the group about this, and after the failure of this venture he returned. In fact, his solo activity was not a failure, but the most important thing is that in 1982 each of the participants was already engaged in his own solo project, and therefore the decision to disband the group was unanimous. They all wanted to take a break and take a break from their joint activities, but already in 1983 the band reunited and began work on a new album. The Live Aid concert is shown in the film as the band's first performance after a long break in communication, although the band actually released the album a year earlier and embarked on a world tour to promote it.

The film features a character named Ray Foster, a label manager for EMI, who ditched the song Bohemian Rhapsody because it was too long and recommended that the band write more commercially attractive music. In fact, there is no documentary evidence that such a character really existed, as the head of "EMI" Roy Featherstone was in reality a big fan of the group.

On the screens, Freddie Mercury meets his future boyfriend Jim Hutton at a party he organized, where Hutton was present as a waiter. In fact, they met in a London nightclub in the 1980s, when the musician was already famous, and Hatton was then working as a hairdresser, not a waiter. And their relationship began in 1985 and lasted 6 years, until the last days of Mercury. Perhaps for this reason, Jim is shown very little in the film, because the final of the picture shows the Live Aid concert of 1985, when the couple had just begun a relationship.

The most complaints from attentive viewers were caused by the recognition of the singer to the group members that he is HIV-infected. In the film, he communicates this in the finale, just before the 1985 concert. This story is pure fiction, designed to keep the emotion at the end of the film. According to Jim Hutton, Freddie did not know anything about his illness until 1987, he announced this to his colleagues in the group in 1989, and made a public confession only in 1991, the day before he left.

The distortion of this fact caused a flurry of indignant reviews. One of the critics wrote: "".

Many fans of Freddie Mercury believed that the film did not show the most important and most difficult period in his life - the last 5 years, after the concert “Live Aid”, without which it is impossible to understand his character. They also draw attention to the fact that many striking episodes of the musician's biography remained behind the scenes: Little known facts about Freddie Mercury.