Actor turned producer Michael Winchester plonked a bath in the middle of Church Street Mall on Tuesday to draw everybody’s attention to his first feature film Bathing Franky. It worked.
Passers-by stopped to ask about the bath, in turn giving him the chance to tell them about his new film which premieres at Riverside Theatres tomorrow night, Saturday, May 26.
Watch our video interview with Winchester and film distributor John Simpson below:
Bathing Franky, he said, tells the story of a young man, Steve (Shaun Goss) who, as a condition of his parole, delivers Meals on Wheels to Rodney (Mother and Son’s Henri Szeps) and his aging mother Franky (Fat Pizza’s Maria Venuti) .
Winchester said Rodney had invented an elaborate world of make believe to cope with being his mother’s full-time carer.
‘‘He juggles, he tap dances, he sings, he speaks in different languages,’’ he said.
Winchester said he based the character on a man he observed in his home town in the Hunter Valley region, where the film was also shot, who dressed very differently to everybody else.
‘‘As an actor, which I am before I am a writer, I went home and developed the world of this character ... how he might have lived,’’ said Winchester, whose credits include Prisoner and Sons and Daughters.
‘‘Although the script took 10 years [to develop], pre-production was only about six weeks and we actually shot the film in four weeks."