Yellowstone Actress Qorianka Kilcher has filed a lawsuit against James Cameron and the Walt Disney Company over the unauthorized use of her image without her consent.
In the lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday and previously reviewed Hollywood ReporterKilcher claims that Avatar The director extracted her facial features after watching her performance in Terrence Malick’s 2005 film New Worldin which she acted when she was 14 years old, and directed his design team to use it as the basis for the character Neytiri.
The complaint specifically refers to an April 24 YouTube video of Cameron discussing his exhibit at the Tech Noir Museum in Paris, in which he recounted how he made… Avatar. In the clip, he explains the design inspiration behind Neytiri and recalls noticing Kilcher’s appearance in it New world And how her face continues to shape the character.
“This is actually the lower part of her face,” he said in the video, also telling a story Kilcher cited in her suit about Cameron giving her a gift when he told her she was the inspiration for Zoe Saldaña’s on-screen role of Neytiri years earlier.
Kilcher claims she first met Cameron in person in March 2010 at an environmental charity event, shortly after the first film was released in 2009. Avatar film. At the event, the director told the actress he admires her activist work and said he has “a thing for you.” The suit alleges that Cameron invited her to his office to receive a “surprise gift.”
Kilcher and her mother later went to Cameron’s office, and while he was not present at the meeting, his assistant gave her a sketch of Neytiri that had been drawn and signed by Titanic exit. It also came with a handwritten note, which read: “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting for another film. Next time.”
“When I received Cameron’s drawing, I thought it was a personal gesture, at most a loose inspiration related to my casting and activism,” Kilcher said in a press release. “Millions of people opened their hearts to Avatar Because they believed in his message, and I am one of them. I never imagined that someone I trusted would systematically use my face as part of a complex design process and incorporate it into the production pipeline without my knowledge or consent. This crosses a major line. “This action is very wrong.”
“This case exposes how one of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers exploited the biometric identity and cultural heritage of a young Indigenous girl to create a record-breaking film franchise — without credit or compensation to her — through a series of intentional, non-expressive commercial actions,” the complaint reads. “Plaintiff Corianca Kilcher, a Peruvian actress and activist, was only 14 years old when director James Cameron extracted, replicated, and commercially disseminated her facial shape as functional biometric source data in… Avatarcharacter design pipeline, without her knowledge or consent. This action does not seek to restrict or penalize speech or artistic expression; It seeks to address the unlawful taking of the plaintiff’s property: her face, which was used as a commercial production asset to generate billions of dollars in profits.
The actress is seeking punitive and compensatory damages, disgorgement of profits attributable to the use of her image, injunctive relief, and corrective public disclosure.
“What Cameron did was not inspiration, it was extraction,” said Arnold P. Peter of the Peter Law Group, Kilcher’s lead attorney. “He took the unique biometric facial features of a 14-year-old Indigenous girl, subjected her to an industrial production process, and made billions of dollars in profits without even once asking for her permission. This is not filmmaking. This is theft.”
THR She reached out to Cameron and Disney for comment, but did not hear back by press time.
May 7, 3:42 p.m Updated with comments from Q’orianka Kilcher and Arnold P. Peter.
