Nikki Bennett as Nikki Raye, the club singer who dreams of making it on Australia’s Gold Coast.

THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

There are two of them in the United States: Las Vegas and Atlantic City - three, if you count Branson, Missouri, which is coming up fast on the rails. In Australia, though, there is just the one: it’s called the Gold Coast. The name says it all: if not invented, it was at least mined for all it was worth by the Queensland Tourist Board when, in the early eighties, the big tourist developments began, transforming a flat stretch of sandy shore into one of the world’s top tourist meccas. Golden sand, golden sun, golden opportunities... the place where all your dreams come true. They all have one thing in common, these places where tourism and entertainment are virtually the only industries: the glamour doesn’t extend more than a couple of blocks back from the ocean (or, in Vegas’ case, from The Strip). And it’s that brash, best-foot-forward aspect which made Shirley Barrett fall in love with the Gold Coast: it’s a land of dreams where you have to be pretty single-minded - or pretty lucky - not to wake up next morning with a hangover.

“I love the place,” says the Australian director who burst onto the international scene when her debut feature, Love Serenade, won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 1996. “I love the snazzy high-rise apartment blocks, the gorgeous beaches, the seedy run-down shopping strips full of mobile-phone outlets and Cash Converters [glorified pawn shops, where goods can be ‘converted’ into cash]. It’s got a crazy, hectic, holiday atmosphere about it, which I find completely seductive. A lot of people come here hoping to get rich quick, and then come badly unstuck.”

“What attracts you when you first arrive on the Gold Coast is that it’s a little bit Las Vegas: glitz, glamour and gold,” says Barrett’s cinematographer Mandy Walker, who worked with her on Love Serenade and also shot the following year’s Cannes competition entry, The Well. “But then you look underneath that facade, and you realise that half the places are for sale and there’s a lot of run-down and neglected places with multi-storey buildings going up next door to vacant blocks and little old houses.”

Especially attractive to Barrett and Walker was the fact that, like Vegas, the Gold Coast is a magnet for every kind of entertainer with even half a chance at the big time. People like Nikki Raye (played in Barrett’s new film by veteran Australian club entertainer Nikki Bennett). She is the character Barrett started off with when she began developing what was to become Walk the Talk, in the months following Love Serenade’s Cannes honeymoon. “I started off wanting to write a story about a not very successful club singer who’s never going to be famous, but who still aspires to do so,” she says, admitting that the character was less easy to find than she at first expected. Then fate lent a hand.

“My brother-in-law was on The Midday Show [an Australian daytime light entertainment programme], so I taped it,” she recalls. “But, before he came on, there was Nikki Bennett singing ‘Miss Otis Regrets’. I found myself really drawn to watching her: she just totally sold the song. I was having trouble writing the character at the time, so I’d rewind the tape and keep watching her. And somehow, even though Nikki Bennett is the complete opposite of Nikki Raye, her character started to come together for me.” A few weeks later, on a research trip to the Gold Coast, Barrett came across a brochure advertising Bennett as a performer at one of the local clubs. “And so,” she says. “it’s no accident that my girl in the script is called Nikki!”

Fate seems to have been pretty busy round about that time, because Barrett also received a call from DreamWorks’ David Geffen, who had seen Love Serenade and wanted to be involved in the director’s next project. Excited but a little sceptical, Barrett flew to Los Angeles for a meeting with Geffen - and returned with a development deal and what turned out to be unconditional, hands-free support for the new film, whose actual production chores were - as with Love Serenade - in the highly capable hands of Jan Chapman, best known for her work with Jane Campion (including Cannes Palme d’Or-winner The Piano).