Indigenous actress Q’orianka Kilcher, who played Pocahontas in the 2005 Terrence Malick epic The New World, has filed a lawsuit against director James Cameron and the Walt Disney Company alleging he stole her likeness for the character Neytiri in his Avatar series.
The lawsuit from Kilcher, a Peruvian native, alleges that Cameron “extracted her facial features” and “directed his design team” to base the character Neytiri on her appearance after he saw her face in the Los Angeles Times advertising The New World.
“One of Hollywood’s most powerful film-makers exploited a young Indigenous girl’s biometric identity and cultural heritage to create a record-breaking film franchise – without credit or compensation to her – through a series of deliberate, non-expressive commercial acts,” said a release about the lawsuit.
The lawsuit further said that Avatar billed “itself as sympathetic to Indigenous struggles, all while silently exploiting a real Indigenous youth behind the scenes,” per The Guardian:
The release goes on to describe a meeting between Kilcher and Cameron in 2010, after the first Avatar film’s release. At an event, the director told the actor that he had a gift for her: a framed sketch of Neytiri that he had personally drawn and signed. Along with the sketch, Kilcher says 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 claims that Cameron had not attempted to book Kilcher for the project, despite her agent’s efforts to get her the opportunity to read for a role.
Kilcher further accused Cameron using her face as part of an elaborate design.
“Millions of people opened their hearts to Avatar because they believed in its message and I was one of them,” said Kilcher. “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 pipeline without my knowledge or consent. That crosses a major line. This act is deeply wrong.”
Kilcher pointed to a statement Cameron gave in an interview wherein he stood with his original Neytiri sketch saying “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.”
Kilcher’s attorneys said that Cameron’s reference to her likeness 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 film-making. That is theft.”
Cameron has not commented on the lawsuit.