Collaboration with Queen

Dolezal and Mercury first met when the Austrian director and film producer was working as a reporter for a German television, during an interview with the band. After the interview, he made a "tongue-in-cheek remark", telling Mercury to give him a call if he needed a good director for his next videos.^[5] Mercury's manager did call Dolezal in 1985, and asked him if he could shoot the music video for "One Vision", Queen's new single. It was the first collaboration of a "fruitful relationship between Dolezal and the band".^[5]

About Mercury Dolezal said:

Freddie and I developed a language together. He was very, very, fast. He was very intelligent, very clever, and you had to be always on your toes. He was very impatient. He wasn't even finishing telling you what he wanted, but he wanted it that moment!^[5]

Dolezal also said that Mercury was very diligent: "If I had a shoot where I said, 'Freddie, you have to get up at 5 a.m. because I want to have the sun going up behind you,' he was there 5 a.m.". He and Mercury developed a strong friendship.^[5]

Dolezal knew that Mercury was not well when he came to him to shoot the music video to "These Are the Days of Our Lives". He said Mercury knew it was the last time he would be in front of a camera. Although filmed in color, Dolezal decided to render the video in black and white, in a "desperate attempt to conceal Mercury's physical deterioration". The Queen's frontman had not yet reveled his illness to the public, nor did he talk about it except within a restricted inner circle of friends. The friends "did their best to carry on as normal". Dolezal stated that his friend didn't want any special treatment from them, and carried the disease bravely.^[5]

Dolezal paid tribute to Mercury with his Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story, a Grammy-nominated documentary released in 2000. It was Dolezal's second Grammy Award nomination.^[2][5]

Other works in the music industry

In the music industry, Dolezal worked on many videos for, among others, Tom Waits, Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen and Whitney Houston; in addition to his work with Queen.^[2][5]

In 1999, Whitney Houston was at the peak of her career since "The Bodyguard", with her album My Love Is Your Love on the hot charts. While preparing her world tour, she gave full access to Dolezal to trail her, "wanting to tell her story at a time when speculation about her life behind the scenes was intensifying."^[7] Dolezal was finishing a music video for Houston when the singer traveled to Austria to give her "final approval". Since Houston was "looking to kill some time after they were done", Dolezal showed her some of his other work. He showed her his Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story, and a documentary he made for the Rolling Stones. While watching the latter she told Dolezal, halfway through the documentary, "Rudi, I want you to do a film like this about me".^[2]

Interviews, revealing moments with Houston and her family in the backstage and onstage performances were all filmed, and the documentary was set to be released under the title Whitney Close Up. However, the work was not released due to the singer's struggle with substance abuse that led to her death. After reading the headlines about she being sent home from the Academy Awards because of cocaine addiction, Dolezal called Houston, and then came to her house. He proposed her to talk about the problem in the documentary, to add a short interview, to be filmed even there, in her apartment, where the singer would mention her drug problem, but Houston refused and Dolezal left.^[2]

The more than one hundred hours of footage remained in obscurity for twenty years, until they were released in Whitney: Can I Be Me, co-directed by Dolezal, in 2017. The documentary was critically acclaimed.^[8][9]

Dolezal has received three Romy awards, most recently in 2008 – together with Rossacher – for the documentary series Weltberühmt in Österreich – 50 Jahre Austropop.