The Peruvian actress Q’orianka Kilcher I sue the film director James Cameron for having used her face without authorization to create a character Neytiri from the acclaimed franchise Avatar.
“Plaintiff Q’orianka Kilcher, a native Peruvian actress and activist, was only 14 years old when director James Cameron extracted, replicated and commercialized her facial image as a source of functional biometric data in the Avatar character design process, without her knowledge or consent,” reads the introductory part of the lawsuit to which she agreed. Infobae.
With the demand, which also reaches disney, Lightstorm Entertainment and 20th Century Foxthe actress asks for anything from a public apology to 750 thousand dollars for each unauthorized use of his image in the million-dollar film franchise.
“Cameron’s initial film in the series grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of all time, yet it was constructed in material part from the misappropriation of a minor’s biometric facial features as unpaid commercial source material,” the document reads.
As part of the evidence that, according to the lawsuit, confirms that James Cameron used the facial features of Q’orianka Kilcher The interview that the film director gave to the Kombini YouTube channel in April 2024 is recorded. There, Cameron reveals that the “original source” of a sketch of the character Neytiri was a photograph published in the Los Angeles Times of Q’orianka Kilcher as part of the campaign for the film “The New World” (2005) in which he starred.
“She played Pocahontas in ‘The New World,’ so this (points to the sketch) is actually her lower face, there was something very interesting about it. She went to see it years later and I gave her a signed copy of this. I gave her a poster print that she has over the fireplace because it’s not that she was the inspiration for the character, but I just wanted to show her how a specific person’s appearance could be reflected in the character,” he said at the time.
In that line, Kilcher He also asserts in his lawsuit that he has a letter signed by Cameron where he says: “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. For the next one.”
He even claims that he met with James Cameron in his office in 2017, which was not made public due to a confidentiality agreement, but at that time he also did not inform him that he took his face to give life to Neytiri.
One of the tests that Kilcher account, he says, is the interview with the main character designer of Avatar, Jordu Schell, who claimed that he worked from “Cameron’s Neytiri sketch of Q’orianka, as well as multiple photos of Q’orianka.”
The lawsuit also mentions production sketches where Kilcher’s features were drawn directly from the specific newspaper photograph. Los Angeles Timesas well as records of the laser scanning of the models based on his face.
Under the charge of “unauthorized digital replication” (deepfake), the actress affirms that she felt “shame, humiliation and anxiety“because his face would have been used, through CGI technology, to perform a sex scene in the film Avatar.
Request one court order to edit or delete sexual scene from all future versions of the film and destroy digital files containing his image in intimate situations.
