A Tiger Fighter is Hard to Find is a story about a scene director who struggles with shooting a scene about a fight between a man and a tiger. Originally the scene is done with a fake tiger but, the show caught the provincial mayors attention and he decided wanted them to redo the show, with a real tiger this time in order to submit to the Beijing film festival.
Huping, the main character who fought the tiger agrees to fight a real tiger and act out the scene. It goes well but they miss a key part forcing them to reshoot the missing segments. Needing to reshoot the scene, the directors chose to use the real tiger again, but this time tranquilizing it to a lesser degree to shoot the entire scene.
They quickly found out it hadn’t been sedated enough, almost catching Huping in its claws. Still needing the key parts of the scene to be filmed, the directors decided to finally use a fake tiger. But they had to have Huping act one more time and finish the scene.
When they started shooting the scene Huping attacked the fake tiger, just as he had done previously to the real tiger, hitting it with all his might. Both actors recovered physically but Huping was left mentally unstable while the actor playing the tiger was now out of work and with no family.
To me, the story talks about how far people are willing to go please others. The crew goes through the lengths of illegally getting a wild tiger in order to shoot the scene. They then jeopardize the crews safety by using the real tiger and end up ruining at least 2 of the actors’ lives. The director allowed scenes to keep running even in times of real danger like with the tiger and in the end when Huping was beating up the other actor. The story illustrates how sometimes people get too caught up in trying to achieve the expectations of others or pleasing them.