This episode features host Adam Charles’s extensive conversation with Richard Trombly, an American filmmaker who has spent 11 years carving out a career in China’s film industry despite arriving with no job, no contacts, and no knowledge of the language. The conversation offers unique insights into working as an expat filmmaker, navigating Chinese film culture, and building an international career from scratch.
Leaving America for Asia (2003)
Political Motivation: Trombly left the U.S. in 2003 due to political disillusionment. He was “politically active” and deeply troubled by the Bush administration and the Iraq War, which he viewed as “a corporate profit-making war.” He references Lara Lee’s documentary Cultures of Resistance, which explored how corporate monoculture was driving people out of the U.S.
The India Plan Falls Through: Originally planning to go to India with a journalism opportunity, that job fell through. Already committed to leaving for Asia, Trombly “started making calls in desperation,” contacted news agencies including Associated Press (where he’d worked before), and learned Shanghai Daily was hiring. He took the job planning to stay only one year while “getting things sorted out.”
No Film Background: His only film involvement was student projects in college and taking “film and theater as literature” courses at UMass (in the 1980s, same era as Charles), expecting he might teach it someday. He never really felt he’d make movies – but technology democratized filmmaking beyond what was possible when they were students.
Early Career: Journalism to Film
Shanghai Daily (2003-2004): Trombly spent a year as an editor at Shanghai Daily. This coincided with China signing the WTO agreement, which included promises to “open their media” – promises China made with no intention of following through (“yeah, we’re going to open our media” followed by inaction). He’d hoped to become an assigning editor and trained business writers but was relegated to the copy editor desk. “I’m not in Asia just to do copy editing.”
The Hollywood Reporter: After freelance reporting for various outlets, Trombly became the Shanghai Correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter (during its pre-tabloid era as a legitimate industry magazine). He experienced the publication’s corporatization under Nielsen, which employed “Glengarry Glen Ross” tactics – pitting stringers against each other for bonuses rather than supporting collective success.
Entry into Film: His transition came through multiple channels:
- Acting: Got cast as an extra with his kids in The White Countess (2005), the final Merchant Ivory film – a WWII epic with “crazy logistics” shot in Shanghai. As Trombly notes, “If you are in Asia and you are foreign, you will end up being at least an extra in a movie.” This included a named part with a couple of lines.
- Script Work: Through film circles, people learned he was “an editor and a writer” with international experience and film knowledge. He was asked to edit a “really bad script that’s greenlighted,” helped improve it before shooting, then wrote another script that got produced.
- Additional Work: Did subtitling, translation work, and festival proposals for various filmmakers.
Building a Theater Community
Trombly maintained his love of community theater from his journalism days in the States. Meeting other actor types from short and feature films, they realized “there’s no community theater in English” in Shanghai (only big stadium productions like Cats with running translation bars). They started their own English-language theater community, which became an important networking and creative outlet.
Chinese Theater Culture: Trombly praises Chinese stage actors as “consummate professionals” who “don’t make any money hardly doing it” – they’re “so devoted to doing their art” that money isn’t the object. “There’s a real art thing in China that is beautiful.”
Chinese vs. Western Acting Styles
Traditional vs. Modern: Chinese actors tend toward more traditional, conservative styles due to the “rigid educational system.” This is especially evident in film acting. While modern Shakespeare companies in the West have evolved toward naturalism (recognizing Shakespeare as “common man’s theater”), Chinese actors often bring too much “Beijing opera” theatricality to film.
The Challenge: “It’s really hard to get them in touch with real emotion because they really want to be acting. And if people know you’re acting, it’s probably not what we want to see on film.” One actor told Trombly: “But no one would know I’m acting.” Trombly’s response: “Yes, yes, yes.”
Evolution: The style is changing, particularly among younger, self-taught actors watching international videos. However, Beijing Film Academy teaches “a very party line idea of what films are, which is probably about 20 years behind… every general is 20 years behind the technology of the war that’s being fought.”
The Seminar Moment: Years back, Shanghai Film Festival held a seminar on “making movies that audiences actually want to see.” Trombly’s reaction: “You need a seminar for that?” A Beijing Film Academy friend confirmed professors taught students “we shouldn’t think about the audience because we’re the artists and we should give them what we think they need.”
Chinese Cinema and International Crossover
What Americans Think is Chinese Film: Most films Westerners associate with Chinese cinema (Shaw Brothers, Bruce Lee) are actually Hong Kong productions. Major crossover successes like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Farewell My Concubine succeeded due to universal elements (martial arts action, artsy approach providing novelty in early 2000s).
Chinese Reaction: When Crouching Tiger became huge internationally, reactions in China were basically “we’ve been doing this for decades, what’s the big deal?” The wirework that Americans had never seen (and “never wants to see it again”) has since infiltrated all superhero movies.
The Crossover Problem: Films like Red Cliff (directed by John Woo) were “done in such a Chinese style” that despite being perfect crossover material, they “bombed in the U.S.” The live-action Mulan seemed like a perfect marketable crossover but “didn’t go anywhere here.”
Why Films Don’t Cross Over: Chinese films miss international filmmaking standards because of script issues and “touches that take people out of the fourth wall” – something about acting or staging makes you realize “we’re in a movie.” Trombly’s cinematographer friend talks about productions with great elements and beautiful shots, but “the way they set something up, you just don’t believe what’s happening in front of the camera.”
Literary Tradition Gap: Unlike Western culture’s long tradition of tight novel structure (from Greeks and Romans through European literature), Asian histories went “volume after volume after volume until the author died. That’s why it ended as opposed to it ending at a right time.” The West developed the heroic cycle; the Bardic tradition created tighter story structure.
They Don’t Need To: Like Bollywood, China has a massive domestic market (1.2-1.4 billion people) who “love our weird style of filmmaking.” There’s money in it without international distribution.
The Chinese Film Market and SARFT
Government Control: SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television) in Beijing mandates that foreign films can make a maximum of 40% of box office revenue. “They always say, well, 60% of the box office this year was Chinese films. So Chinese films are getting more powerful. Like you mandate it, that’s going to be 60%.”
Market Manipulation: When a foreign film like Avatar makes too much money, they pull other Chinese films while Avatar plays, then flood theaters with Chinese films while stopping other foreign releases. They’ll schedule big Chinese films against big American releases to limit foreign film performance.
Theater Explosion: China has been building so many theaters that budgets are finally going up, but historically films were “turning out movies in like 20 days” with crews working 16-hour days easily. This affects quality – after 16 hours, “people hardly even care what’s happening.”
Cultural Identity and the Alphabet
Trombly offers a fascinating historical perspective: When European Ambassador McCartney (Trombly played him in a film and loved being “the guy who didn’t bow to the emperor”) brought European modern knowledge to Emperor Chen Long, the emperor dismissed it as “toys” and “tribute.”
The Alphabet Rejection: The alphabet was invented once, then adopted or adapted worldwide – except by China. Other cultures took it whole or created variations (like Korea), but “almost only the Chinese worldwide said… that would make a lot of people able to read… so, no, we better not do that.” This suggests an “unusually strong sense of cultural identity” that accounts for places where Chinese culture doesn’t meet up with other parts of the world.
Current Projects
Analysis (Short Film)
The Story: About a young math genius girl with mild Asperger’s syndrome living in her fantasy world. Inspired by Google cloud computing, chess computers, and the 40th anniversary of the Rubik’s Cube.
The Rubik’s Cube Connection: The cube wasn’t designed as a toy but to demonstrate group theory – the mathematical principle that you can make a thousand turns, but what matters is the result, not how you get there. The girl has a natural talent for this type of thinking.
Isaac Asimov Influence: Like Foundation‘s super-computer predicting humanity’s future, she tries to use massive computing power to solve human interactions. Having Asperger’s and not connecting well with other kids, she thinks “a computer could figure it all out and just give me the answer.”
Personal Connection: Reflects Trombly’s genius daughter (now at Tufts) who was with him in China. References his connection to Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors), an Amherst native whose younger brother had strong Asperger’s – something Trombly’s family has dealt with.
His Daughter’s Chess Observation: After Deep Blue determined the best chess move from any board position, Trombly’s daughter said, “Why would I ever play chess? There’s either you make the right move or you make a mistake. This isn’t a game and it doesn’t take intelligence. It’s about pattern recognition.”
The Kid from the Park: Trombly contrasts his own chess approach (spending minutes studying the board) with a tough New York City kid he worked with in youth services – the kid would look away during Trombly’s turn, glance at the board for one second, and make an instantly brilliant move. “I’ve had salads that [had] more mentally going on than this kid most of the time” – yet pattern recognition made him a chess savant.
Production: Live-action with intensive CGI/VFX to visualize her fantasy world. Shot with the intention of being a quick, compelling demo reel to prove his directing abilities after being told “we don’t know you as a director” when pitching feature scripts. “Your demo reel doesn’t [show enough]… all right, well, let’s do a quick, easy, genius, wonderful… tour de force of what I can do directing.”
The Two-Year Reality: “Supposed to be quick. And then two years later… this won’t be as quick as we want, but maybe it’s kind of good. It’s kind of compelling.” The delay was due to no money for post-production – working on it “after 11 o’clock at night, after you’ve done the paying job.”
The Aging Star Problem: The young actress was aging out while post-production dragged on – a reality of low-budget filmmaking with child actors.
Festival Success: Finally completed (except for final output requiring a new computer system), it’s been accepted to several festivals and played at one in preview format.
The Graphics Team: Created a successful collaboration between Pierre DeSelves (deep experience in classic 2D cel animation), Tim Giovanni (founder of Crashdown Studio, modern 3D animation expertise), and Trombly’s storytelling depth. This team continues as an ongoing concern pursuing feature films in Shanghai.
Nepal Documentary Projects
The Discovery: Through “the magic of social media,” someone contacted Trombly about making a movie about Nepal. Initially resistant (not primarily a documentary filmmaker, pursuing fiction), Trombly changed his mind after hearing the story.
Documentary Economics: For feature fiction films, you bring your script and vision to festivals, get funded on paper without paying money upfront. For documentaries, “since everyone’s got an idea for a documentary, they don’t want to hear an idea. They only want to see some footage you’ve got.” You must “put some skin in the game” unless you have governmental or college contacts.
Self-Funded First Trip: Trombly self-funded a 10-day trip with his camera and microphone to capture footage, filling all four 32GB memory cards daily.
Nepal Context: The second poorest country in the world (after Ethiopia), smaller than Taiwan, was a monarchy until five years before the interview (around 2009). They overthrew the monarchy and established a government that started building roads.
The Road Story: The subject is a man from Nepal’s far west who walked a month to reach Kathmandu (the only major city) because there were no roads. In Kathmandu, he encountered roads for the first time. His village (the capital of his province) had only a mule trail. After seeing other towns get roads, he determined: “I got to get me a road for my village.”
The Explosives Solution: When the road reached 30 miles from his village, solid rock prevented further construction. He requested explosives to blast through, but the government refused during the Maoist rebellion (fearing rebels would steal explosives to attack the capital). His solution when they said they wouldn’t send explosives by plane (because “that’s a bomb… remember 9/11?”): An official sarcastically said, “If you sit in the plane with the box of explosives on your lap, we’ll do it.” He responded: “Okay.” They were shocked (“we weren’t serious”), but he held them to it – and they did it.
The Incomplete Road: The road was supposed to continue to China, connecting China to India. Two valleys fought over which would get the road (bringing prosperity), fighting so hard that “corrupt officials said, okay, you people can’t agree. I’m taking the money” for dinners, cars, and nights out. The road stalled, though a bridge finally connected the village (800 houses – “they call that a city”).
Indiana Jones Bridges: Even with the road reaching the village, cement delivered by truck had to be carried one bag at a time down a hill, across a cable bridge, and up the other side – until the bridge Trombly filmed being constructed was completed.
Poverty Reality: When Trombly was introduced to people, his guide specified their caste and “how many months of the year they were able to grow food for themselves.” Example: “These people only grow eight months… they have to do manual labor for other people the rest of the time and they get paid in food.”
Diet: Almost no green vegetables – cucumbers, peppers, and grains dominate because these last long-term. Limited greens are pickled for minimal nutrition year-round.
Health and Beauty: Women are “so beautiful until they’re 25” but have had two children by then, taking “so much out of their body” due to malnourishment. People are “very, very thin and malnourished.”
Technical Challenges: Municipal power went down the day Trombly arrived and stayed down the entire trip. Fortunately, “so many people don’t trust the power” that solar deep cell batteries were common. People had internet on mountaintops “where there were not even wires to their house.”
The Work Schedule: Up at 5am, walking all day. No hotels – staying in people’s houses, eating their food, with hosts asking no money. At 11pm after talking with people, spending two hours transferring footage, backing up, erasing cards, and charging batteries.
Terrain: Rain forest extending far up mountains where people created terraced farmland in “treacherous” conditions.
Current Status: Now commissioned work – looks like funding from a government organization and an NGO to produce something on poverty alleviation. Using footage from the first trip to augment new filming. Simultaneously building the feature project about the road, hoping a 10-minute teaser can go to festivals like Guangzhou (attracting Nat Geo, Discovery, BBC Documentary, CCTV China Documentary Channel) or Rotterdam to win funding.
Working as an Expat Filmmaker
Beijing vs. Shanghai
Beijing: “Kind of insular… very hard to get into as a foreigner.” Trombly spent three years there developing “wonderful connections” but realized “I don’t think I could be a Beijing insider.” Beijing was where the communist takeover made filmmaking a state enterprise.
Shanghai: “Much more open to foreigners.” The original Chinese movie industry before the communist takeover produced “beautiful movies… you could put them side by side with anything that was coming out of Hollywood at the time” with similar volume. Shanghai was a fishing village until the late 1800s when foreigners made it a city during the Opium War – “it’s always been” more accepting of international culture. Shanghai means “up from the ocean” (Shang = up, Hai = ocean).
The Actor Network: Beijing has a “very tight group” of foreign actors, most with really good Chinese, who know all the agents. Unlike the U.S. where agents work for you, in China “you’re delivered as a commodity and you have to have multiple agents” because some have better contacts for certain producers. Actors share information instead of competing – “Hey, this is the agent working on this movie” – trying to get each other working as much as possible.
Agent Competition: Some strategic playing between agents exists – discovering one agent was offering 1,000 RMB while another offered 2,000 for the same job, realizing “the other guy was pocketing a thousand on me.”
The Language Barrier
Still Limited After 11 Years: Trombly’s Mandarin is “slow to progress… I get by with it, but… in some ways I’m still learning English to be writing at the level I’m writing.” He notes good writers practice and improve their native language into their 50s and 60s.
The Nabokov Exception: Charles brings up Nabokov writing Lolita (one of the most sophisticated pieces of English literature) in his second language – extremely rare. Even literary translators primarily work only into their native language.
Writing System Challenge: The writing system is particularly hard. Learning Chinese means “learning two languages because there’s 80 different dialects that are mutually unintelligible… and they all use the same writing.” This was forced as Chinese empire and culture were pressed upon other people – their lingua franca was the written word.
Shanghai Bilingual Culture: In Shanghai (and Beijing to some extent), constant bilingual opportunities meant whenever Trombly tried Chinese, people responded “yeah, okay, that’s pretty good. Now let’s go to English” because they wanted to practice. As an editor who taught at college, he’s “one of the only people who can teach me higher level of English” – most English teachers are just native speakers, not professionals.
Set Vocabulary: Trombly has the language for working on film sets but relies heavily on a bilingual DOP or assistant director “who really knows what I want in script.”
Script Translation Process
Multiple Translators: Rather than one translator, Trombly works with multiple people who translate differently. “Then we’ll hash out what they each think I was saying in English and what the finer points of each of their very good and acceptable translations were. And then we… all learn a lot more about our language in the process.”
Improvisation Problem: Actors sometimes improvise during shooting. Trombly knows his script well enough to recognize when “they didn’t say exactly what I said.” He must check with the assistant director: “They just said this… does it cover it or no, that’s not going to do it.”
Consensus Approach: Having multiple translators allows reaching consensus, though Charles notes “that is tough… something I never even thought of about working in another language.”
Working with Children
Preference: Trombly loves working with kids because “they don’t have any hangups yet, and they’re really genuine in trying to perform.” Either they can do it or they can’t – no pretending. “Casting is everything if you’re working with kids.”
Kids’ Capability: “It’s amazing what kids can understand, what they can grasp and what they can do.”
The Golden Rule: “Always keep the camera rolling no matter what… when you say cut, you’re not really cutting, you know, just keep that camera rolling because there’s always so much stuff on the B-roll that you can use.” Sometimes keep rolling during practice “because sometimes that’s where they got it, and then they get something in their mind, and you’re not going to get it again.”
Budget Realities
Smaller Than Hollywood: “Budgets are smaller than Hollywood by far.” Even on feature films, “they work crews hard… turning out movies in like 20 days and working people 16 hour days easily.” Quality suffers when “you’re pushing over 16 hours, obviously people at the end hardly even care what’s happening.”
Trombly’s Approach: “At least one thing that I try to do is try to respect the crew a little bit more.”
The Foreign Filmmaker Advantage
Always an Outsider: “You’re always going to be an outsider of the culture, and that led to some of the best movies made in the U.S…. when a foreign filmmaker comes in and makes a movie about America, it’s what they choose in America, what they see.”
Ang Lee Example: His work on American films is genuine but “like no other filmmaker would make.” Even The Hulk, despite its mistakes, became “the most interesting superhero movie that’s come out of the mainstream in the last 10 years or so.” Lee later realized “he forgot one thing. He didn’t grow up with comic books, so he forgot they were supposed to be fun.”
The Impact: Lee stretched boundaries so far that subsequent superhero movies (including Kenneth Branagh directing Thor) became possible. “They pushed the boundaries so far out that anything after that is almost conservative… you’ve got to rein it back in.”
Career Advice for Expats
If Dropped in Another Country: Trombly’s strategy if starting over (using India as example):
- Go to a bigger city with an art scene
- Attend art events
- Communicate with as many people as possible
- Find people interested in communicating with the expat crowd
- Gravitate to “the more open local people and a mix of people from around the world who are expats”
The Expat Reality: “Some of them are going to be artists and painters… it’s really hard to think about going back to the picket fence after you spent enough time abroad, because you are meeting these people who… didn’t fit in and that’s why we’re expats. It’s not that we’re smarter. It’s not that we have great skills. We didn’t fit in.”
Creative Necessity: “That brings about a lot of creativity… by necessity, perhaps, because as a foreigner, you have to somehow justify why you’re making a living in any foreign country.” You’re either “performing something that local people aren’t doing, or you’re willing to do the lowest jobs that they’re not.”
Additional Projects
Indian Feature Film: Through LinkedIn networking, Trombly shot Chinese scenes for an Indian first-time director’s sci-fi film screening September 26th in one Indian province. An engineering student made a bootstrapped film where his character “uses our technology to the point of science fiction” and “saves his home province.”
The director needed shots making it look like “the whole world’s watching” this danger that would “endanger the world.” From a region without a large foreign population, he had no connections for foreigners. Trombly shot newscasters and people watching TV with various foreigners and Chinese people in Shanghai. “It’s cool to have a credit… for second unit for an Indian film.”
The Favor Exchange: The director had offered support on Trombly’s corporate projects, so Trombly reciprocated. They “commiserated” over their respective challenges.
The Journalism Background
Trombly reveals his interviewing technique: Rather than asking direct questions that make people nervous, “I just chatted with people and put them at their ease and they’d tell me things.” When they said something quotable, he’d ask them to repeat it so he could “make sure I get it perfect.” Often they’d say “I can’t believe I just said that to a reporter,” and Trombly would offer: “Then maybe I misheard you. How about you say it again to me in the words you want to use, because I’m going to print something. So just make sure it’s what you want me to hear.”
Charles’s observation: “I got the impression from your Facebook posts and videos that you were a very quiet guy.” Trombly: “People have to tell me to shut up. I used to be a reporter.”
Documentary Influences
Hirokazu Kore-eda: One of Trombly’s favorite filmmakers, also a former journalist. His film Nobody Knows “looks… obviously it was funded, so it’s cleaner than [Trombly’s] Waiting, but there’s so many similarities… the way he photographed children, some of the touches… similar thoughts… he came from being a journalist and so did I.”
The conversation concludes with Trombly emphasizing the value of not fitting in, the creative communities that form among expats, and the unique perspective outsiders bring to any culture they document or dramatize.
- Season Finale: Field Guide to SPIRITED AWAY, GILLIGAN’S ISLAND Real?, BBC Spaghetti Tree Hoax, EXORCIST-CIA Connection, Hollywood Star Secrets, 13 WOMEN - October 28, 2025
- THE EXORCIST: Faith, Fear, and the True Story Behind Hollywood’s Most Haunted Film - October 21, 2025
- THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE and The REAL Possession of Anneliese Michel - October 14, 2025
