An Indigenous actor has filed a lawsuit against James Cameron and The Walt Disney Company, claiming that her image was used without her consent as the basis for the character of Neytiri in Avatar.
Q’orianka Kilcher filed the suit, with a press release (shared by The Guardian) alleging that “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”.
The lawsuit claims Cameron used an image of Kilcher published in The LA Times, promoting the 2005 film The New World, in which she played Pocahontas. The press release went on to describe a meeting between Kilcher and Cameron in 2010, after Avatar’s release, at which he told her he had a gift for her – a framed and signed sketch of Neytiri, with an inscription that read: “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time.”
Kilcher claims that no attempt was made to cast her in the film, and that the extent to which she was an inspiration for the character did not become clear until she saw an interview on social media last year, where Cameron stood with the LA Times image alongside a sketch of the character, 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.”
The press release alleges that the use of her image 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.”
As yet, neither James Cameron nor The Walt Disney Company have responded to NME’s requests for comment.
Released in 2009, the first Avatar film remains the highest-grossing movie of all time, making over $2.9billion (£2.1billion) worldwide. The character of Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana, is central to the film’s storyline, as well as its sequels Avatar: The Way Of Water (2022) and last year’s third instalment, Fire And Ash.
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