Back in 1965, it was a mark of great national pride in Canada when “Winter Kept Us Warm” became the first English language film from the country to premiere in Critics Week at the Cannes Film Festival, a feat even more remarkable when it introduced another language that was quite uncommon for the time on screen. Although director David Secter would often have to refer to his debut feature in interviews at the time as centering on an “unlikely friendship” between Peter (Henry Tarvainen), an incoming college freshman, and Doug (John Labow), a big man on campus who openly resents that label, the relationship that unfolds between them is clearly something more, sneaking past censors that might’ve frowned upon gay-themed movies in that era when Secter needn’t be explicit with what the men felt towards one another when words would only feel woefully insubstantial anyway.
Secter himself hasn’t endured a cold Canadian winter in some time, now residing in Hawaii and continuing a creative life (more on that later), but even at 22, he knew where the heat was he watches Peter, an English and philosophy major have trouble adjusting to the university life in his first time away from home, feeling a chill in the air in trying to engage with anyone and far more comforted by the friends he finds in books such as T.S. Eliot poetry. He isn’t initially made any more welcome by Doug, who teases him in front of friends at dinner when Peter has to take a part-time job as a waiter as part of paying his tuition, but he can’t help but be intrigued by how he often keeps to himself, not to mention the Finnish raisin roll the newbie receives in the mail from his parents, and sets about drawing him out, only for Peter to turn the tables a bit when his interest in theater leads him to find a new friend in Sandra (Janet Amos), making Doug a bit jealous.
“Winter Kept Us Warm” may get by largely on subtext, but Secter throws in a locker room scene that seems intended for one specific audience in particular and over the years, the film has been increasingly embraced as a queer classic, though it had been difficult to see outside of a DVD released in a limited run in 2011 and infrequent repertory screenings. That has all changed with Canadian International Pictures’ 4K restoration of the film, reviving a number of gems from the provinces in recent years, and the black-and-white film looks as luscious now as when the wet print first left the lab decades ago. Said to be an inspiration for David Cronenberg to get into filmmaking, among others, the film can be looked back at as a rare acknowledgement of passionate same-sex relationships in mainstream moviemaking at the time, but feels constantly alive with its boisterous jazz score and the invention required of the cast and crew to transcend a bare bones budget.
As an artist, that search for money never ends as Secter recently noted when he’s busy at work on an ambitious new musical for both the stage and screen, but on the eve of a revival run of “Winter Kept Us Warm” at the Metrograph in New York ahead of a national theatrical tour, he generously took the time to talk about how he made it all work against all odds 60 years ago and having his debut feature taking its rightful place as a landmark film.
It’s tremendously gratifying to think that anything you do will resonate 60 years later, and it’s particularly apt because there’s been such a sea change in the public approach to homosexuality during this time. I can’t think of any social movement which has changed so drastically as the public attitude towards the gay community. When I made “Winter Kept Us Warm,” homosexuality was a triple taboo. It was a crime, a sin, and a mental defect. Church, the state, and medicine, the three primary institutions all condemned it. Yet a generation later, this kind of widespread disapproval had changed to, in some cases, reluctant, and in some cases, enthusiastic acceptance. And in the West, at least, I think the public has basically recognized that gay people are part of society and while it survived for eons under the radar, although unfortunately as soon as the West started accepting it, I think the adoption of gay marriage strengthened the reaction against it in other parts of the world, so I think the fight continues.
But I’m thrilled that a new generation is going to have an opportunity of seeing what things were like just a couple of generations ago and that the movie is reaching a new audience and that there’s a new 4K print so it looks as good and sounds as good as it can. It’s still a student film and there are flaws built in that can better be corrected. But I’m just delighted that it’s still reaching an audience and seems to resonate with people today.
From what I understand, this was inspired in part by your own freshman year experience of college. Is it interesting personally to look back on that time with the film as a partial reflection?
It was certainly inspired by an autobiographical experience. I fictionalized it, so it is an original story, not simply a biopic. But it was inspired by a relationship that I had and at the time there was no such thing as gay pride – I don’t know of anyone really who was out at the University of Toronto. There were so few people who were out at all. Allen Ginsberg and James Baldwin were a few of the well-known people who were out at the time, but there were so few and most of them were poets or writers. But the idea that somebody could be out and still have some kind of career was almost unimaginable and if someone had asked me when we were making the film that within a short period of time, gay marriage would be legalized, I would have thought, I wonder what they were smoking.
Yet although it was such a taboo subject, I felt it was worth tackling. We never used the term gay at the time because the term was really not in common use. And I use euphemisms [throughout the film] like Doug finds himself more attracted and involved with Peter than he would have thought possible, but avoiding terms like “gay” or even “homoerotic.” And I think the cast really all [gave] perfect performances, yet they claim that they were not really aware of the gay subject matter when we were making the film. I question that because I think if you look at the film, the performances are pretty clear, yet because we were using euphemisms, they were able to deliver those performances without having to acknowledge that we were making a gay film, so it was an interesting dynamic.
Then when the film came out, interestingly, it was quite well-received. In fact, it was lionized by some critics, yet some of the even very favorable reviews made no reference at all to any homoerotic element. To them it was just like a campus story, a rite of passage, a fleeting friendship. Other critics, by and large the gay critics, recognized what was happening and called it what it was. Today, I think it would be pretty impossible for somebody to look at the film and not recognize the central queer theme, but at the time, things were less explicit, so it was possible for people to look at the film and not have to recognize that element. It still intrigues me that the same film can be interpreted so differently by different people.
Is it true you shot on a budget of $8000?
No, the truth is we had no money to make the movie. [laughs] When I started doing it, I was hopeful that the student council would kick in some money and they came up with such a paltry sum. It was really irrelevant and there was nowhere in Canada that was teaching film, so basically nobody in Canada had a chance to learn how to make movies in Canada and in order to come up with some motion picture expertise, I went to what was then a technical school called Ryerson. It’s now a full-fledged university. At the time, they didn’t have a film course either, but in the third year of a still photography course, they offered a film option and the fellow who taught that course agreed to invite his students to get involved.
Two of the students really became committed to the project and became the directors of photography. In one case, Ernie Meershoek had planned to be a portrait photographer and he got bitten by the film bug because of “Winter” and spent the rest of his career as a major cinematographer in Canada. But basically, we were learning on the job because none of us had ever made a movie before. I had made a small short, a silent film really, and that’s what got me fascinated and committed to embarking on making a feature. But frankly, it was just out of total ignorance. I had so little idea of what was really involved in making a feature-length film. I quickly learned the enormity of what we were tackling. But once I started, I was convinced that if we shot a couple of scenes and showed them to potential partners that someone would come through with some money. It never happened. We were able to get some leftover film from different companies and shot a lot of stuff on short ends that had been left over from commercials and other industrial films.
Remarkable. My mind was blown at how many big crowd scenes there were, like outside the Harry Belafonte concert. Were you throwing your cast right into an event like that and filming?
That’s exactly what happened. We simply showed up. I had actually cast a couple of people to play Doug’s parents, but for some reason or other they had to bow at the last minute, so we went to that concert and when it was over, I simply looked for somebody that I thought would be appropriate and asked them if they would be in the scene. To this day, I have no idea who those people are, but they played Doug’s parents brilliantly. I don’t know whether they ever saw the movie or even were aware of the fact they were in it. Maybe somebody saw them and bought it to their attention, but we were frequently doing that, going to an event and trying to incorporate it into our story – and sometimes making waves in the process.
There’s also an amazing scene with Doug and Peter running around in a ton of a snow. Obviously, you had to have it, given the title, but was that a bear on the production?
We waited weeks for the right snow. When it finally arrived, we had maybe eight cameras parked around the quad to shoot that scene. Uh, but I did feel that was such a central scene to the movie that we had to wait for the right conditions and then be ready to take advantage of it when it happened. But I was delighted that scene worked out and of course, we were often improvising. For instance, who knew a squirrel was going to come running through the scene? But the actors were so adept at taking advantage of things like that and so was the camera crew and whatever happened, we rolled with it and throughout the movie, got a lot of spontaneous moments like that.
Another thing that was really exciting is the photo montage you put together to depict campus life early on – there’s a great moment where you coordinate the slide trombone in the music with the movement of the picture. What went into putting that together?
That was really created by necessity because by the time we started shooting, the leaves were all gone. The fall was clearly over, so the only way I could show some of those early scenes was with that photo montage and I managed to get ahold of some terrific photos, so I created that scene And I really lucked out with the music. A student at the time, Paul Hoffer was quite well known in jazz circles in Toronto, although he was quite young, as we all were in the early twenties. He was keen to write music for a film and put together a first-class combination of prominent Canadian jazz musicians, and really came up with the terrific score that really elevates the whole movie. I was thrilled as much as anybody to see how well the music worked and Paul and I went on to work on a couple of other movies together.
Speaking of which, what have you been up to these past few years?
Well, I have been occupied in a wide range of activities. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with a documentary a nephew of mine made over 25 years ago called “The Best of Secter and The Rest of Secter,” which is available on YouTube to give you some idea of what I’ve been doing since “Winter Kept Us Warm,” but currently, I’ve just completed the book and lyrics for a musical called “Rule of Fire,” a new musical in old Hawaii, which is a cocky, queer concoction of history, myth, and fantasy that tells the story of Kamehameha the Great, the founding father of Hawaii who was a young man of 20 when Captain Cook arrived and changed the history of Hawaii forever. We’re trying to develop that as both a theatrical musical and also both an animated and live-action feature film, so I’m still trying to stay in the game and get into the game.
“Winter Kept Us Warm” will screen at the Metrograph in New York on June 21st at noon, June 22nd at 7 pm and June 23rd at 6 pm. It will also screen in Los Angeles at the Los Feliz 3 on June 29th at 4 pm.