From left: Gwilym Lee (Brian May), Ben Hardy (Roger Taylor), Rami Malek (Freddie Mercury) and Joe Mazzello (John Deacon) star as Queen in Bohemian Rhapsody Photo: Alex Bailey / 20th Century Fox.

When Bohemian Rhapsody arrives on DVD this season it will contain full-length songs of Queen’s six-tune Live Aid set — an extended 20-minute version of the sequence that closes the film in London’s Wembley stadium. In theaters, the scene lasts 12 minutes and includes four songs. Although the songs were performed by the actors and shot in their entirety, the set was trimmed to keep the film at 134 minutes. 

Production numbers for “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “We Will Rock You” will be added to the existing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Radio Gaga,” “Hammer to Fall” and “We Are the Champions.”Presumably viewers will be able to select which ending they’d like, for a 134 or 146 minute version of the film.  The 1985 Live Aid mega-concert brought together the world’s biggest superstars in a benefit concert that took place July 13, 1985 on two continents: at Wembley Stadium in the UK and the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia.

“That Live Aid scene was tough, because as the climax of the movie. It had to work,” explained editor John Ottman. Since the scene was filmed on a stage erected on an old airfield, the Wembley superstructure as well as the roaring crowd was added using digital effects. Basically, a small portion of the audience was filmed for reaction shots, then tweaked and digitally multiplied to look like a stadium filled with some 80,000 cheering fans. As scenes go, it was the most expensive one in the movie to augment. Costs were kept to a minimum by concentrating on stage shots of the band performing.  The extended footage is good news for fans of actor Rami Malek, who plays Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, rescuing some of his most provocative dance moves from the cutting room floor.

While Malek delivers a force-of-nature performance, his singing was enhanced for the lead vocal delivery during the performance sequence was enhanced for the film. While 99 percent of the singing in the film (virtually all the live performances) was Freddie Mercury, Malek did warble a few tunes (including “Happy Birthday”).  The challenge of crafting Malek’s singing so it was believably Mercury’s fell largely to music supervisor Becky Bentham, who mixed Malek’s vocalizations sound-alike Marc Martel and Malek for the final onscreen performance.

After discussing with the director and the producer, Bentham categorized each song based on whether they are an on-camera performance or a background video. Having established how much existing material is available, from backing tracks to vocals, Bentham then ended up with a list of requirements for each pre-record sessions. She then laid down all the materials needed for each play back. The pre-records were sent to the cast to practice with vocal and instrument coaches.

“For Bohemian Rhapsody, we were lucky to have access to all the original vocal recordings and all the original band recordings,” Bentham explained. “In addition to that, we recorded a sound-alike for those sections where recordings don’t exist, as well as Rami Malek’s performances, which formed a library of materials that we then turned into a soundtrack that was as authentic as possible.” The film’s soundtrack release  album is all Queen — 22 tracks including five Live Aid tracks (and a studio version of “Crazy Little Thing”).

For the singing scenes in Bohemian Rhapsody, however, Bentham required the actors to sing out along to the pre-recorded songs. “It’s vital because it gets the movement in the throat and the facial muscles,” Bentham said, noting that from her perspective the Live Aid scenes were the easiest. “The tracks were all pre-recorded, so it was just a matter of playing them back at high volume to get the band in the right mood.”

Rami Malek (Freddie Mercury) gets a makeup retouch from Jan Sewell during a Live Aid scene. (Photo: Alex Bailey / 20th Century Fox)

Bentham credits Malek and the rest of the for their dedication to getting the music right, “putting in the hours with their coaches to achieve what we’ve got,” she said. “Ben Hardy played a little bit of drums already, so he had a framework that we were able to build on. Gwilym Lee played some guitar, and Joe Mazzello played a bit of bass. Like Rami, they all spent long hours working with the pre-records. ” For Malek’s reference sound-alike Martel was recorded and filmed, so he would also have the visual reference “to ensure he had the same physicality, from body movement to the breaths he takes.”

Martel, a Canadian vocalist, has parlayed his recreation of Mercury’s singing into a cottage industry, even being recruited to perform tribute shows with the band. Martel’s most recent release, Thunderbolt and Lightning, available through MarcMartelMusic.com, consists of eight Queen songs. For the Live Aid scenes in particular, Malek also drew on the skills of movement coach Polly Bennett.  “I knew I was going to have to sing, to do a British accent, to move all over the stage. I met Polly Bennett, and we immediately hit it off.”

Their research also highlighted Freddie’s love of Liza Minnelli and the film Cabaret, his interest in the work of the film’s director/choreographer Bob Fosse and his admiration for opera and its glamorous divas as well as his contemporaries Mick Jagger and David Bowie. “Rami and I worked on giving a little bit of a Bowie shape here or a Liza Minnelli hand movement there in his performances in the early ’70s which then disappeared as he started to embrace his homosexuality,” Bennett said. “You have to remember that homosexuality was only decriminalized when he was 20, and it would have had a huge effect on his sense of space and his attitude with other people. But as he writes more songs and becomes famous, he becomes bolder.”

One of the scenes Queen singer Brian May said he is particularly pleased to see included in the film is the band‘s first appearance on BBC-TV program Top of the Pops performing “Killer Queen” in 1974. The band credits the appearance with propelling them to international stardom, due in no small part to Mercury’s outrageously suggestive writhing and skintight outfit.

The decision to make Live Aid the central performance of the film, bookending the story,  seemed a no-brainer for producer Graham King. The concert came at a pivotal moment as it brought the band back together after Mercury’s move to Germany, where he recorded two solo albums. It also came at a time when Mercury was at his lowest ebb, surrounded by hangers-on and falling dangerously into a spiral of drug and alcohol abuse.

Organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for those affected by the famine in Ethiopia, the Live Aid concert featured one of the largest satellite link-ups and TV broadcasts of all time, watched by an audience totaling 1.9 billion in 150 countries around the world. King is pleased that the film, and now the DVD, succeeds in capturing the band’s epic performance, as well as how their music came together overall. “How does a band create their music? That’s a really difficult thing to show on screen,“ he says. “The audience is going to really enjoy seeing that. It’s not just Freddie’s story, it’s also the story of how they created the sound. How did they invent ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ which was completely panned when it came out?”

Ironically, so was Bohemian Rhapsody the movie. But after opening at No. 1 at the US box office, it’s a bona fide hit that earned back its budget the first week of release.