Avatar director James Cameron and The Walt Disney Company have been hit with a lawsuit accusing them of using the likeness of actress Q’orianka Kilcher without her knowledge or consent.
So, what’s the deal? According to the complaint, Kilcher has alleged that after she starred as Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s The New World, Cameron used her facial features to design the character of Neytiri in Avatar. The complaint adds that her likeness was replicated in production sketches, maquettes, and digital models, which together led to the billion-dollar blockbuster franchise.
“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.“
After the release of Avatar in 2009, Cameron apparently invited Kilcher to visit his office, where a member of his staff presented her with a framed sketch by Cameron. It included a handwritten note from the director, which read: “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time“
Kilcher said, “When I received Cameron’s sketch, I believed it was a personal gesture, at most a loose inspiration tied to casting and my activism. 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.“
Kilcher’s complaint seeks compensatory and punitive damages, disgorgement of profits from the Avatar films attributable to the use of Kilcher’s likeness, and injunctive relief regarding the use of the Neytiri character moving forward. Also, the complaint states that Cameron and Disney would be required “to issue a public statement or corrective notice acknowledging Plaintiff’s contributions and correcting any false or misleading statements about her.“
The lawsuit states that Kilcher only recently learned that Cameron had used her facial features after an interview began circulating last year.
In the video, Cameron is standing in front of one of his original sketches of Neytiri. “There’s a young actress named Q’orianka Kilcher who played Pocahontas in The New World,” he said. “So this is actually her, her lower face. She had a very interesting face. And I wound up meeting her years later and I gave her a signed print of this – this is actually the original — I gave her a signed print of it, which she has up over her fireplace.“
Cameron added that Kilcher wasn’t the inspiration for the character, but he “wanted to show how a specific person’s look could come through in the character, and that was important, because the second we cast Zoe [Saldaña], you know, Neytiri suddenly looked like Zoe.“