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

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