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What were we saying just the other day about everyone in America suing everyone else for everything? Less “Land of the Free” and more “Land of Billable Hours”. This time, it is an actress suing the makers of Avatar.
Q’orianka Kilcher (Yellowstone) has, according to a report in The Guardian, filed a lawsuit against Disney and James Cameron. In it, she alleges that the design of Avatar co-lead character Neytiri is her, especially her face, and she didn’t give permission for it to be used.
The suit goes into detail, alleging that Cameron “extracted her facial features” when designing the character, asking his design team to base the character design on Kilcher as Pocahontas in the 2005 Terrence Malick film The New World.
Native Peruvian Kilcher says, in a statement via her lawyers, that this 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.”
Seems ridiculous and can easily get thrown out of court, right? Well, not so fast! It turns out that Kilcher met Cameron in 2010 after Avatar had already gone stratospheric, and he gave her a framed sketch of Neytiri that he had drawn himself and signed. He told her at that meeting that she was the inspiration for the character.
Uh-oh!
The filing also says that her agent made efforts to get her an audition, but was unsuccessful. It also uses, as evidence, an interview from Cameron that surfaced online where he admits that the actress was the inspiration, specifically her face. Lawyers… Assemble!
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