Australia is drawing record levels of international screen production – and Western Australia is betting millions that Perth Film Studios can bring some of it west
Tom 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.
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