Can a $290m film studio on a former cow paddock lure Hollywood to Perth?

T om Avison is just back from Los Angeles when I meet him at Perth Film Studios on a warm May morning. The studio’s inaugural chief executive was on a whirlwind sales trip, squeezing “about 16 or 17 meetings” into four days with the likes of Netflix, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney. “Basically any production company that you can think of,” he says. “They want to know what’s going on.” Back at the major new facility in Whiteman, on Perth’s semi-rural north-eastern fringe, the British screen executive is in tour guide mode: affable, brisk, fluent in the strange mix of logistics and optimism required to launch a studio from scratch. Before Perth, Avison helped open Sky Studios Elstree outside London, a major production base that launched with Wicked and later hosted Jurassic World and Bridget Jones. But the Perth role – which he discovered, almost improbably, via LinkedIn – “hooked” him because it offered the chance to shape not just a facility, but an industry still defining itself. “Not long ago, this was just a cow paddock,” he says wryly, as he walks me through the 16-hectare site. Over the past three years, the paddock has been remade into a world-class film studio: four vast sound stages, production offices, workshops, service roads and a backlot larger than the playing field at Perth’s 60,000-seat Optus Stadium. Work is already under way in one of the sound stages on the six-part Stan and ITV mystery-thriller Two Birds. …