Bohemian Rhapsody, the film that narrates the first fifteen years of the rock band Queen – from their formation to Live Aid 1985 – will be out in cinemas on 29 November. The Italian dubbing was directed by Marco Guadagno: «I must confess I would have never stopped working on this film. I love this genre, I loved working on it. Whenever I found a minor mistake, even just a small subtlety, I would immediately point it out, just to carry on working. But at a certain stage, as Pupi Avati once told me, the things you work on come to life and you must let them go.
Anyway, I must have seen it ten or twelve times, and it moved me every single time. And I wasn’t the only one: anyone who walked into the dubbing room felt a swirl of emotions, a mix of excitement and fear, before such a grand film. Everyone craved to be a part of it, to participate somehow. Several colleagues of mine asked me to be in the film, just to utter one single line. On the other hand, we could also fully feel the weight of responsibility, which risks hindering the work. So that’s the atmosphere we had in the dubbing room. It was a very tough job, because the clock was really ticking. But everyone was overjoyed and enthusiastic about it. I loved this film even before actually getting to see it, because Freddie Mercury is one of my favourite singers, so I was particularly keen on the job, on doing it exceptionally well. I spared no energies, nor did the people who worked with me.
I tried to reconstruct in the best possible way what Bryan Singer narrated in Bohemian Rhapsody: a Freddie Mercury who thinks and acts outside the box, but is also melancholic and fragile.
Allow me a brief cycling-related detour, since I am a big cycling fan: Freddie Mercury reminds me of Marco Pantani. Because when you get to the top of the world, when you become the best, the number one, nobody can understand you. The anguish of being alone at the helm is terrible. When you’re number two, you still have a goal to reach. But when you’re number one, you can only go back, there’s nobody ahead of you… Freddie Mercury was indeed a trailblazing genius and, because of this, he was very lonely. This is an aspect Bohemian Rhapsody zeros-in on, and that’s what makes it particularly interesting, in my opinion.
Even opera singer Giacomo Lauri-Volpi wrote about it in his Cristalli Viventi: an artist, to allow his audience to enjoy his crazy intuitions, must be alone. If he wants to reach a certain level he must learn to accept he is different from all the rest; by no means can he be conformed. Sometimes, success drags you away from reality and leads you to look for something that you will always be missing. That’s a curse that Freddie aptly represents. And putting all that into dubbing was very difficult, because we had to work on the nuances and on syllables to recreate such a multifaceted character. Sure, I would have loved to work forever on this film, but I must say that I’m very pleased with the final result.»