INSIDER MAGAZINE: Screenwest CEO Rikki Lea Bestall steers local screen industry through massive growth phase

Margot Robbie’s Barbie movie has made in excess of a billion dollars worldwide, and well over $65 million in Australia alone. That’s good business in anyone’s book. Bright lights. Big names. Bigger money. For most people, these are synonymous with the screen industry, but there’s another side the public rarely considers. A far less glamorous side, involving tax rebates, incentives and bureaucracy, where people such as Screenwest chief executive Rikki Lea Bestall ply their trade. After 20 years of working in Australia and Hollywood, helping to oversee projects featuring the likes of Jamie Foxx, Kevin Costner and Robert Downey Jr, Bestall was appointed CEO of WA’s peak film funding body in 2021. The goal? Quadruple the size of the State’s screen industry in five years. The pandemic got Bestall’s tenure off to a rocky start, but the rebound is real, and now she anticipates this calendar year will be a record-breaker. “We’ll have our biggest year by far, the biggest production we’ve ever had,” Bestall tells Insider. To put that in perspective, the record for total contracted production budgets in a given 12-month period was set in the 2018-19 financial year, at $89.1m. That equated to $6.45 for every dollar Screenwest provided in grant funding, This month, some of those Screenwest dollars will see screen icon Sam Neill shooting season two of The Twelve for Foxtel in and around Perth. Neill is no stranger to these parts, having brought some star power to Mt Barker in 2018 to make the comedy-drama Rams with Michael Caton. Fresh from winning a Logie for his portrayal of Brett Colby QC in The Twelve, Neill will reprise his role in the legal drama and take on another high-profile murder case, in what is officially the biggest screen production of its kind to be filmed in WA. The production includes locations in the metro area and the Wheatbelt, and the Cook Government estimates it will contribute $9.6m to the economy. It was brought west by the WA Production Attraction Incentive, which is a funding initiative bankrolled by the State Government and administered by Screenwest. Also due to start production in the near future is a 10-episode TV adaptation of multi-award winning WA author Holden Sheppard’s book, Invisible Boys. Stan commissioned the series following a joint development initiative with Screenwest, designed to foster local talent. It explores the challenges faced by a group of gay teens in Geraldton, after one of them is outed on social media following a tryst with a married man. The production will be shot on location in the Mid West coastal town, as well as in Perth. Looking further ahead at the production slate, three established WA producers each have projects under way with budgets all in excess of $10m, including a new feature from veteran producer Jamie Hilton. Hilton’s See Pictures production company was behind the 2017 adaptation of Tim Winton’s Breath, directed by and starring Simon Baker, and now another WA author is in his sights. Jasper Jones author Craig Silvey has penned a screenplay based on his book Runt, which will begin shooting in November in Perth and the Wheatbelt, under the eye of H is for Happiness director John Sheedy. The local factual content companies, which have been kicking goals for years, have significant projects ahead, too. But all this success comes with a cost. “We’re going to have three years of growing pains,” Bestall admits. “We are moving and growing so quickly right now that we’re going to have to be flexible.” That means building capacity — the idea is to have enough crew for multiple major productions to shoot in WA simultaneously — but this is an industry where people move to where the work is, so retention of talent soon becomes an issue. “We’re building the capacity, but you can’t do that without overloading a little bit, because people will just move if there’s not ongoing work,” Bestall explains. “So it’s this ebb and flow that I think will be our biggest challenge as an organisation, to make sure WA crew have that shot (at work), and we don’t lose them.” One of the major factors that influences where a movie or TV series is shot is government incentives, such as the aforementioned WA Production Attraction Incentive, which typically offer a capped rebate at a fixed percentage of the production’s budget. “You get that as a grant at the end of production,” Bestall says. “It’s payable on you providing an audit — that’s a reputable, independent audit — that says you spent $10m in the State, so I’m going to give you $3m or $2m or $1m, or whatever the percentage is.” When it comes to incentives, the State Government has committed $20m over four years to the production attraction initiative. New South Wales, on the other hand, has committed $175m over five years to its Made in NSW film fund. Added to the Federal Government’s film incentives, NSW was able to secure the production of George Miller’s Mad Max prequel, Furiosa, which was estimated to inject $350m into the State’s economy. Queensland, Victoria and South Australia also have incentive schemes, but WA is not just competing against domestic rivals to attract film and TV productions. “Incentives are basically provided everywhere around the world,” Bestall acknowledges. “What generally happens is (the studios) have people that might be based in LA, who are doing the calculations from every single territory — you might do South Africa, you might do Croatia — these are key competitors. “So, they look at all those things and work out that they can do it cheaper in Croatia, but, you know, you’re going to deal with some other elements, like maybe the crew isn’t quite as westernised as you might want; there might be language barriers, or your top cast members or director will not go there. And so that’s always a good thing that we have — everyone always wants to come and shoot in Australia; they love the crew, they love the balanced lifestyle, so we have all that going for us, but often money talks.” Tom Hanks confirmed as much when he spoke at the Australian premiere of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis last year, which the Oscar-winner shot on the Gold Coast. “There is no better place in the world to make a motion picture than right here on the Gold Coast,” Hanks said. “I speak from experience; I’ve shot films in Morocco, New York City, Seattle and Berlin, but none of them have what the Gold Coast has — and what is that? In two words, none of those other cities have Dan Murphy’s.” The Cook Government is now finalising its 10-year WA Screen Strategy policy after a period of consultation, which will confirm future incentives and provide details on how former premier Mark McGowan’s much-ballyhooed studio project will function. The $105m studio was announced at a star-studded event in Fremantle ahead of the 2021 State election but the initial plan for a Victoria Quay site quickly became unworkable and the project was moved to the Malaga industrial precinct. Screenwest has consulted on the proposed studio but is not managing the project, however Bestall hopes it will make her job of attracting productions to the State a lot easier in years to come. “There’s lots of films that need studios, particularly if they’re CG-heavy or need a big build (in terms of sets),” she says. Those films now go to New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, which have well-established studio facilities. For example, Perth director Simon McQuoid is set to make his Mortal Kombat sequel at the Gold Coast’s Village Roadshow Studios, which is expected to contribute $68m to the local economy and generate 560 jobs. To paraphrase the iconic line from Costner’s 1989 sports fantasy, Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come, but Bestall doesn’t necessarily want the mega productions coming to WA just yet. “Bringing a $200m film that might shoot all year (when you don’t have enough crew to support it) … would just obliterate everyone and everything (in the WA screen industry),” she says. “Victoria and New South Wales have always (been in that blockbuster production space), and they built their infrastructure a long time ago, which really helped with that. South Australia and I think Queensland have both had 10-year, incredible trajectories, and it’s about infrastructure, and then production attraction incentives, as well as making sure that the locals always continue to develop the content as well, because you don’t want to just bring in Marvel films. I think Queensland’s had a little bit of bad publicity around that.” WA probably also has a way to go when it comes to removing bureaucratic hurdles that might be thrown up by the scale of Hollywood blockbusters. “We’ve also got things we’re working on at the moment in terms of film-friendly policy, like trying to get roads closed,” Bestall offers as an example. “In New South Wales, it takes two weeks; here, it could take 16 weeks, so those things are frustrating as hell for a big film if they’re used to working in Sydney and Melbourne and Queensland.” Other States also offer payroll tax exemptions to film productions, so it would literally cost producers more to pay Ryan Gosling to make a movie in WA than it would on the east coast. “There are things like if (the actor is) in and out of WA in 14 days you can work around (the payroll tax burden), but, the bigger we get (in terms of production size), producers are not going to come here if they’re paying another half a million dollars just to bring the cast here,” Bestall laments. Buried under a mountain of popcorn, choc tops and Gosling’s pearly-white grin, it’s easy to believe the old adage that there’s no business like show business. Indeed, it’s a commercial undertaking like few others. Imagine you run a company, composed almost entirely of contractors, with varying emotional investment in your ideals and goals, and your task is to harness their disparate skill sets to manufacture something. You think you know what that something is, and have secured financing on that basis, but, when assembly finally begins after years of development, it becomes apparent the end product will be quite different to what you intended. Even worse, a brutal market awaits, where, even if everything goes smoothly (it almost never does) and you’ve created a perfect product, the overwhelming odds suggest you’ll lose money — lots of it. Congratulations, you’ve just made a movie, and be thankful, because most in your line of work don’t make it that far. Yes, every now and then a Barbie comes along that provides hope of similarly striking it rich, but such success is almost impossible to recreate unless you’re willing to also commit more than $100m to marketing. The bad news is coming up with that sort of marketing budget doesn’t guarantee anything, and the best case scenario might still be to break-even. For every big name there are countless others who will amount to nothing more than a line in a film’s credits, if they’re lucky. This is an industry in which commercial failure is the most common outcome, and dreams dissolve into cold, hard reality faster than a director can yell “action”. Even from an early age, Bestall displayed a remarkable prescience around these realities. As an 11-year-old, she remembers being transfixed by the Academy Awards. Not by the actors who were all frocked up on the red carpet — Bestall was fascinated by the gaggle of producers who claimed the best picture Oscar. So, after graduating as dux from Woodvale Senior High School, Bestall ignored her parents’ hopes she’d become a paediatrician, and enrolled in an arts management course at WA Academy of Performing Arts. After moving to Melbourne, she got her first big break in 2002, serving in the accounts department on the Aussie period drama Ned Kelly, starring Naomi Watts, Orlando Bloom and the late, great Heath Ledger. “I was doling out the cash to all the big actors, so I was in everyone’s apartments or wherever they were, saying, ‘take some money, spend it wisely’,” she laughs. “Heath was such an incredible person, so kind, it didn’t matter who you were, he was super respectful. He showed me into his fantastic Kombi van at the time that he had redone and driven across Australia.” From there Bestall fell into the employ of veteran US producer Gary Foster, which prompted a move to Hollywood and work on films such as Ghost Rider, The Soloist and When in Rome. Her appointment as CEO at Screenwest represents a return to the organisation, having previously spent eight years there as director of development and later as head of development and production. But it was her time in Tinseltown, in an environment with “lots of money, lots of pressure”, that really honed her leadership skills. “It’s about stakeholder management in filmmaking, because, whether it’s here or in LA, you’re dealing with so many stakeholders — creative, logistical, economical — it’s just trying to balance all those things,” the Screenwest boss says. And, with blockbuster-sized egos in Hollywood, balance wasn’t always easy to find. “I think the worst moment was, when you’re stuck between two very powerful people, they’re asking you to side with one of them,” Bestall recalls. “Whether it’s a director or an actor, or director and the head of a studio, and they’re putting you in a position where you have to choose between who you’ve worked for over two years, and who’s ultimately paying the bills. And they’re like, ‘we want your feedback on this script’, so I’d say, ‘OK, well, I agree with you, and you, but here’s what I would do’.” That ability to achieve balance has never been more important in Bestall’s career as it is now, as WA looks to navigate a rapid growth phase. She must lure interstate and international productions here, while protecting and growing the local industry. There’s a studio that’ll soon need filling, and a State Government to keep happy, which is more complicated now Screenwest has moved to an independent not-for-profit business model. “It’s this massive juggle, nothing’s ever going to be perfect, but I’m used to people complaining, and they’re gonna keep doing it,” Bestall accepts. “If the end goal is to make sure that everyone’s got work, and great people can continue to stay here and work here, and we’re producing international content from locals, and we’re bringing people in, we’re going to be in a great spot.”

INSIDER MAGAZINE: Screenwest CEO Rikki Lea Bestall steers local screen industry through massive growth phase

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