James Cameron and The Walt Disney Company are being sued for unauthorised use of actress Q'orianka Kilcher's likeness without her knowledge and consent. It's alleged that an image of the actress was used by Cameron's design team when he was first creating Avatar to make a foundation for Zoe Saldana's character of Neytiri.
In the complaint filing, obtained by Variety, the Indigenous actress claims that at the age of fourteen, Cameron extracted her facial features from a photograph to help create the foundations for Neytiri. "Plaintiff never consented to Defendants' use of her likeness, either in Avatar or in any related product or promotion," the court filing reads.
Kilcher's likeness was allegedly used in production sketches, 3D maquettes, digital models, and was distributed across multiple VFX studios. "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," said Arnold P. Peter, Kilcher's lead counsel.
In the filing, Kilcher also states that when she first met Cameron, she was gifted a framed print of a sketch he'd made, with a node that said her beauty was his "early inspiration for Neytiri." Disney and Cameron are yet to comment on the lawsuit.
