Actress Q’orianka Kilcher has sued filmmaker James Cameron and Disney for using her image without her consent to create the facial features of Neytiri, one of the protagonists of the Avatar franchise, according to several English-language media outlets that have had access to the lawsuit. The document specifies that Cameron “extracted her facial features” and “ordered his design team” to base the character on her appearance after seeing her in an advertisement promoting Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World, in which the actress, of Peruvian origin, portrayed Pocahontas. “I never imagined that someone I trusted would systematically use my face as part of an elaborate design process and integrate it into a production chain without my knowledge or consent. That crosses a very important line. This act is deeply wrong,” the actress claims in the lawsuit.
Kilcher explains in her complaint that she found out Cameron had used her facial features after seeing a video in which the director of other films like Titanic shows a sketch of Neytiri and states: “The real source for this was a photo in the LA Times of a young actress named Q’orianka Kilcher. This is actually her lower face. She had a very interesting face.” For this reason, the actress’s lawyer argues that the filmmaker did not take inspiration from his client: “He took the unique facial biometric features of a 14-year-old indigenous girl, subjected them to an industrial production process, and generated billions of dollars in profits without ever asking her permission. That is not filmmaking. That is theft.”
The lawsuit, adds the media outlet Variety, describes the moment when Kilcher and Cameron briefly met for the first time at a charity event just a few months after the release of Avatar in 2009. At that event, Cameron personally invited Kilcher to visit his office, according to the text, but when she went to the appointment about a week later, the director was not there and a member of his team gave her a framed copy of a sketch Cameron had made. Attached to the drawing was a handwritten note from the director that said: “Your beauty was my initial inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another film. Next time.”
The actress states in the lawsuit that Cameron did not try to hire her for the project, despite her agent’s efforts to get her an audition for a role. “When I received Cameron’s sketch, I thought it was a personal gesture, at most a vague inspiration related to casting and my activism,” Kilcher states in the document.
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The lawsuit describes Avatar, which has grossed billions of dollars, as a franchise that “presented itself as understanding of indigenous struggles, while silently exploiting a real indigenous young woman behind the scenes.” The character of Neytiri is played in the Avatar films by Zoe Saldaña. “One of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers exploited the biometric identity and cultural heritage of a young indigenous woman to create a record-breaking film franchise, without recognition or compensation for her, through a series of deliberate and non-expressive commercial acts,” reads the lawsuit, according to the British newspaper The Guardian.
The lawsuit also claims that the defendants violated the recently passed California deepfake pornography law, and therefore, they seek financial compensation for the profits attributable to the use of Kilcher’s image, injunctive relief, and a public correction.
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