Actress Q’orianka Kilcher (“Dog,” “Yellowstone”) has reportedly filed a lawsuit claiming filmmaker James Cameron and Disney based the design of the key character of Neytiri in the “Avatar” franchise on her face without her permission, reports The Guardian.
Specifically, the suit alleges that Cameron ‘extracted her facial features’ and ‘directed his design team’ to base the design of the female lead character in the film on Kilcher’s appearance after seeing her in a Los Angeles Times advertisement for Terrence Malick’s 2005 film “The New World”.
Kilcher, who is Native Peruvian, played the female lead of Pocahontas in that film alongside actors Colin Farrell and Christian Bale.
In a press release about the lawsuit, her counsel says what Cameron did was “not inspiration, it was extraction … He took the unique biometric facial features of a 14-year-old Indigenous girl, ran them through an industrial production process and generated billions of dollars in profit without ever once asking her permission. That is not filmmaking. That is theft.”
The release describes a 2010 meeting between Kilcher and Cameron, after the first “Avatar” film’s release, in which the director told the actor he had a gift for her: a framed sketch of Neytiri that he had personally drawn and signed.
Along with the sketch, the suit claims that Cameron gave her a note that read, “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time.”
The lawsuit states her agent made efforts to get her the opportunity to read for a role, and that Kilcher only learned that Cameron had used her facial features so directly after an interview clip involving him began circulating on social media last year.
In that clip, he reportedly says: “The actual source for this was a photo in the LA Times, a young actress named Q’orianka Kilcher. This is actually her… her lower face. She had a very interesting face.”
