Legendary director James Cameron (Aliens, Terminator, Titanic) and The Walt Disney Company are being sued for unauthorized use of an Indigenous actress’ likeness without her knowledge and consent.
Variety is reporting that actress Q’orianka Kilcher, who played Pocahontas in Terrence Malick's 2006 film The New World, has accused Cameron of using her facial features for the design of Zoe Saldaña's character, Neytiri, in the first Avatar movie without permission.
According to the filing, which also names Lightstorm Entertainment and multiple visual effects companies, “the Plaintiff never consented to Defendants’ use of her likeness, either in Avatar or in any related product or promotion.”
“What Cameron did was not inspiration, it was extraction,” said Arnold P. Peter of Peter Law Group, lead counsel for Kilcher. “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.”
Kilcher says that she first met the filmmaker at a charity event shortly after the release of Avatar in 2009. Cameron allegedly invited Kilcher to visit his office, but was out when she dropped in a week later. A member of Cameron's staff reportedly presented Kilcher with a framed print of a sketch with a handwritten note from the director reading: “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time.”
“When I received Cameron’s sketch, I believed it was a personal gesture, at most a loose inspiration tied to casting and my activism,” Kilcher said. “Millions of people opened their hearts to ‘Avatar’ because they believed in its message and I was one of them. 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.”
It seems Kilcher was only made aware of what happened late last year when Cameron himself identified the actress as the source of inspiration for Neytiri in a video interview: “The actual source for this was a photo in the L.A. Times, a young actress named Q’orianka Kilcher. This is actually her… her lower face. She had a very interesting face.”
The complaint also claims the defendants violated California’s recently enacted deepfake pornography statute.
“It is deeply disturbing to learn that my face, as a 14-year-old girl, was taken and used without my knowledge or consent to help create a commercial asset that has generated enormous value for Disney and Cameron,” said Kilcher.
Kilcher is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, disgorgement of profits attributable to the use of Kilcher’s likeness, injunctive relief, and corrective public disclosure.
The lawsuit has been met with some skepticism, with many noting that while there are similarities in the features of Neytiri and Kilcher, the character's final design looks a lot more like Saldaña.