1 - How to Take Tiger Mountain? The Tsui Hark Model

Summary

‘Knowing very well there are tigers in the mountain, but still heading toward the tiger mountain.’

— Chinese proverb

Introduction

Fans of Tsui Hark – hailed as the ‘Hong Kong Spielberg’ – must have been astonished when they found out that he was going to make The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D (2014; hereafter, Tiger Mountain), which was based on one of the yangbanxi (‘model works’) classics approved during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As one of Tsui's fans, I shared this feeling, although I was not unprepared. A great admirer of his early works, especially the nihilistic Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (1980), I was struck by All About Women (2008), the so-called ‘China's Sex and the City’. In this romantic comedy about three modern young women, the trendy, contemporary side of Beijing was foregrounded to such an extent that I almost thought it was commissioned by the tourism administration to promote the capital city to the world. It was with All About Women that I fully understood why Hong Kong filmmakers had left Hong Kong for mainland China to continue to develop their career in the co-production era after the signing of the CEPA in 2003. But for those who were enthralled by the distressed, restless Hong Kong in Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, let alone the futuristic dystopia in The Wicked City (1992), written and produced by Tsui and directed by Peter Mak, Tiger Mountain was the last project they thought Tsui would take. It may have just been wishful thinking on their part though. The contents of the original model work did match well with Tsui's preference for the wuxia (‘martial arts heroes’) genre. Tsui once said in an interview: ‘I have always been a fan of wuxia movies. They give us a refreshed view of what we had before, of the values and of the way we looked at life.’ In addition, as Tsui's favourite theme of jiang hu (‘river and lake’: the world of martial artists in wuxia stories3) also nicely fit with the model work, it was not unreasonable that Tsui would want to turn Tiger Mountain – actually Qu Bo's novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest on which it was based – into a Hollywood-style action blockbuster.