Interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.
I was inexplicably intrigued by the posters for “Retrospective with Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel” plastered around the Humanities Quadrangle. Directors routinely come to Yale, but co-directors are rare. I was surprised to find that they were partners who had shared a decades-long career. I began to see the retrospective as an opportunity to understand the creative duo.
According to Professor Fatima Naqvi, the chair of Film & Media Studies program at Yale and the organizer of the retrospective, Covi and Frimmel have an unorthodox approach to political cinema. “I was interested in bringing Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel to Yale because they make a wonderful kind of ‘minor’ cinema,” she says. “Not minor in any pejorative sense, but in the way it is commonly used in reference to minor literature.”
As I joined Covi and Frimmel during the week at a lecture for Professor Naqvi’s class, a screening of Vera (2022) followed by a Q&A, and even a tour of the Film Archive, I began to understand the “minor” nature of their cinema. They focus on characters on the margins, intimate in scale but emblematic of societal malaise. Yet, compared to most social realist cinema on the festival circuit, Covi and Frimmel’s work pays special attention to the working-class subjects they seek to represent. They often cast non-professionals as themselves and source script materials only from the actors’ real lives.
Vera, Covi and Frimmel’s newest film, is a departure from their previous works, featuring Vera Gemma, daughter of legendary Italian actor Giuliano Gemma, who plays a version of herself navigating the world of fame. Still, Vera remains refreshingly down-to-earth and thematically cohesive with their filmography.
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Robert Gao: So first thing, how does it feel to be at Yale right now?
Tizza Covi: Well, to be at Yale for us is something special because we’re dealing with a very young public compared to [the public in] Vienna, so this is very beautiful.
Rainer Frimmel: And to a very interested audience that also comes from different disciplines. So that they are not only film students, they are all kinds of studies. Everyone sees a different topic in our movies, and that’s always very interesting to get inputs from.
RG: Something you said that really struck me was “speaking at Yale is very glamorous, but the reality of an artist and doing the work that we do is very different.” Especially when you said that Babooska [the protagonist of their documentary Babooska (2005), who works at a circus] said “my life is so lousy, but your life is even lousier.” I usually think of filmmakers as people who have a lot of power. When they tell stories about ordinary people, they have leverage against them. But in your work, I don’t see that dynamic at all.
TC: As an artist, first of all, you don’t have a [stable] income. You have to deal with sometimes gaining good money, but sometimes for a long period not gaining money at all. Even when I talk with colleagues who are quite famous, it’s very difficult for them. Also, you have to always invent new films. You can’t just work on one film after the other, and you have to think about what is the aim of your movies: why do you want to ask for a lot of time from a lot of people, and what are the topics. So, I think it’s very important to say that the life of an artist is not what people imagine. It’s a really, really tough life with ups and downs.
RF: So we are not pretending to be at the same level, but we really are at the same level as our protagonists. When we shot Babooska, we lived with them in their trailers that were being rained into. We wanted to share their lives so they feel that we are taking our work seriously. This kind of trust is very important for us.
TC: For Vera, we also had to live in a very bad hotel in the outskirts of Rome in a small room with all our stuff. We don’t come from a five-star hotel with assistants and trucks with catering. But this way, people see that we need help, and they help us. So it’s giving and taking for both parties. As we are just two people, everyone in the outskirts knew us and they were bringing down coffee to the street or helping us with the bags. They invite us into their homes to eat. They make us one of them.
RG: Because you see similarities between yourselves and the protagonists in your film, I wonder how personal your films are in general, even though they are not autobiographical. For example in Vera, I see that there were a lot of ideas about filmmaking in there, through Vera going to a casting for example.
RF: I think in Vera it was obvious because Vera comes from a family of cinema. She was raised with cinema around directors like Sergio Leone and actors like her father [Giuliano Gemma]. But in all our movies you can find some reflections on cinema or on old movies. We love cinema and we also want to preserve some experience of silent movies. That’s why Vera goes to the silent movie in this. So that was something very personal.
RG: I was fascinated by the fact that the two of you do everything on set. Most sets are much bigger, even if they are independent films. How do you work together as a team? Are there disagreements as co-directors?
TC: In terms of working together, we are so different. We have different views and really different personalities. It’s always half part of Rainer and half part of me. Normally we begin shooting with a general idea of the scene. After the first take, we discuss it. What did you like, not like? Should we add this? Should we be more mobile? We also never rehearse the first take.
RF: It’s always a very intense process because we have all the duties [camera, sound, etc.] usually for a bunch of people. But that makes for exciting filmmaking. If we make mistakes, it’s really our mistake. Still, filmmaking is a teamwork for us. We are collaborating also with our protagonists.
TC: We always ask them: how much from your real life do you want to put into this scene? What do you prefer not to say? etc. A small team makes the actors comfortable, especially because we work a lot with children. The people we work with, they are friends before we start working with them. And they stay friends when we stop working with them. Everybody we ever worked with is family.
RF: To make a conclusion to this question, Tizza always checks that dialogues are working, more the fiction parts. And I’m more the documentary type. I like more the cinematography. If we can say it like that.
TC: Yes, absolutely. You would maybe, without me, never make a fiction with dialogues.
RF: Yes, maybe.
RG: As you are partners in real life, how does that make a difference in your artistic collaboration?
Tizza: In fact, we cannot answer this easily because we just know it this way. We have been together since we were very young, since we were 21 years old. We started to take photographs together before even making films. We could not do a movie without the other.
However, the beautiful thing of this career is that you at times have completely different lives. I spend much time researching, looking for locations, registering stories. I love to write and to put information together and see what story I can invent. Looking for the money, that is Rainer’s part. This is also for us a very, almost political and social statement on our work. They [the financiers] offer us a lot more money than we work now. We don’t want this money because this is public money. We just want the money we need. Every cent we need, we ask for it. But we don’t need so much money like a young person who starts the first fiction film.
In Europe it’s now around one million and a half for first fiction. We work much, much less. We pay our actors always very well, this we calculate. And we don’t make international co-productions because co-productions make a movie even more expensive.
RF: We also lose our independence.
TC: For us, our independence is doing what we believe in. And to be also free to do movies that maybe people don’t like so much but for us to experience something new. Film is an art that always evolves and you have to try to do new things. We do this job because we’re independent. Otherwise we would not do it.
RG: I was surprised to find that you were primarily filming in Italy. Because all the advertising around campus was done by the German department and Professor Naqvi [the organizer] is teaching German cinema. Also, Vera was the Austrian Oscar international submission last year. It seems like Austria has really been the country celebrating your films.
TC: The problem is that the nationality of a film you get it simply through production. As we can easily produce with our own production company in Austria, we don’t look for other money in other places like Italy. Also when we shoot a film, we want to do it right now because we know in two years, maybe we will have another idea. And doing co-production or asking money in Italy for example that would take a lot, a lot of time away.
RF: But after Austria chose the movie [as the Oscar submission], the movie appeared in the media in Italy for the first time. Before it was not so seen because Vera Gemma is also a very ambiguous figure in Italy. But immediately after that she was invited to TV shows. So the Italians were quite proud of that, which is funny.
TC: For us it’s a pity, because I would love to have Austria-Italy as the nationalities of our movies. I’m from Italy and he [Rainer] is from Austria. But it’s not possible.
RG: Going off of nationalities, what is your general relationship with place in your work?
TC: Environment is crucial for us. We choose our protagonists because we like the environment they live in. That’s why we have worked so much with circus people because we love this environment.
RF: Even if we don’t show it directly in the movies. But it’s very present.
TC: Yes, and this change [that circus people go through] is in an artist’s life . You change every week, you change places, you go to another place, you go to another school, you do your performances.
RG: For our closing question: I actually first found out about Vera and you because Sean Baker was posting reviews for this movie and he was doing Q&As in Los Angeles, which compelled me to reach out. I think his work has a lot of the same ethos. I was just wondering if you guys have seen his work and if you know him personally?
TC: Yes, we are friends. We started making movies at the same time and our paths always crossed. I think he’s a really great filmmaker that also fights independently to make his movie like he wants to. So we like his work very much.
RF: Very much. He works with a small budget, with a small team. He has more success, but it’s a similar approach to cinema. And a similar love for cinema.
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After the interview, Rainer offered to take a photo of me and Tizza on his camera. Under the glare of the camera flash, I realized that I, just like their actors, had engaged in a collaboration with them. Tizza thanked me for asking them about their lives as artists because it’s “rarely talked about in the industry.” I expressed gratitude to them for their words of wisdom, for making me feel less alone in wanting to pursue filmmaking. There was giving and taking from both parties.
I escorted Tizza and Rainer out of Bass Library and showed them the way to the Yale University Art Gallery. I watched them walk away, having witnessed a part of the minor film of their lives.