Sacha Horler as Bonita with Pastor Bob (Robert Coleby) and his fundamentalist friends.

“DreamWorks were completely supportive to us,” says Chapman. “They stood by their belief in Shirley’s vision even though it was an unusual situation for them: we were in another country, working with people they didn’t know. But we came to understand and trust each other a lot. There was a constant dialogue about everything we did.”

Most directors, muttering something about striking while the iron was hot, would have made sure that the project got in front of the cameras pretty sharpish after DreamWorks became involved. But not Barrett. It would be the best part of three years before the first clapper-board came down on Walk the Talk. The main reason was that she couldn’t make the script work with the night-club entertainer as its sole focus.

Cue fate again. “I’d been reading a lot of motivational literature, basically because my next-door neighbour kept shoving these books at me,” chuckles Barrett. “So I’d read them, quite cynically of course, but at the same time half-seduced by their message, which is: If you will only stop being so lazy and confused and ineffectual, and instead just be very determined and focused and single-minded and work at it every single moment of every day, then you, too, can be the person you aspire to be.”

Salvatore Coco as Joey, who uses Pastor Bob’s self-motivational slogans in a determined attempt to launch Nikki into the big time.

Which is where the character of Joey - played by top Australian TV actor Salvatore Coco - came in. Joey is a guy in his late 20’s - the kind of guy on whom the Gold Coast feeds. He’s determined to make a go of his life and puts great energy into a number of schemes, none of which pans out. Then he gets sucked into the world of the fundamentalist preachers, for whom the Coast is a natural hunting ground. And he ends up focusing all his attention on Nikki, despite being completely without experience in club management.

“Telling the story from the singer’s point of view wasn’t working for me,” explains Barrett. “Then, when I came up with the idea that she would have a boyfriend/agent, this character suddenly took off on the page. And when that happens it’s great, because the script has a life of its own. So I basically threw out the first outline I’d been working on for a year and started again with Joey as my lead character on his journey as someone who is really trying to change not only his life, but everyone else’s life as well.”

“We’d meet for coffee at a beachside cafe,” recalls Chapman of this long script-development process, “and we’d talk about where she was at. Shirley has a very individual voice and, as a producer, you have to be careful not to interfere with that. I couldn’t really pinpoint the idea too early, but she was interested in this slightly depressed single mother who also wants to be a singer, who is desperate for fame and is trying to work out how to get it. When we’d meet she’d say ‘I don’t know what’s going on but this guy Joey, the talent agent, seems to be taking over and I can’t stop him talking! He just keeps creating his own energy.’”

It finally all came into focus when Barrett put the three ideas - the singer, Joey and the self-help groups - together. “There seemed to be a great many fundamentalist or evangelical churches on the Gold Coast and they’re all huge, with very enthusiastic congregations,” she says. “When I was researching the script, I was very struck by the strong sense of purpose these churches have in a community like the Gold Coast, and that purpose is to pick up all those whose dreams have come unstuck. It seemed to me quite likely that Joey would wander into such a church at a low point in his life, particularly as some of their literature reads like a self-improvement text.”

With a few adjustments - including the character of Nikki’s father, a singer, played by another club veteran, Carter Edwards; Joey’s paraplegic girlfriend, Bonita, played by rising young Australian star Sacha Horler, who took the lead role in Praise; and Pastor Bob (Robert Coleby), who preaches at the church into which Joey drifts - the screenplay for Walk the Talk was ready to start production on November 1, 1999.

But, as with Love Serenade (which was set in the fly-blown small Aussie town of Sunray), Barrett was determined to create a world rather than simply reproduce one.