A certain type of Hollywood story appears subtly, almost like a footnote, and then doesn’t go away. One of those is the lawsuit that Q’orianka Kilcher filed last week in a federal court in California. It is about a face on paper. In actuality, it concerns what constitutes a person, what constitutes a prop, and the precise boundary between the two—a topic that the industry has never really wanted to address.
Terrence Malick cast Kilcher as Pocahontas in The New World when she was fourteen years old. She is remembered by everyone who watched that movie. She seemed almost out of step with the rest of the cast, including Colin Farrell, because of the stillness in her presence. Around the time of release, a cover image appeared in the LA Times. She claims that James Cameron saw that one image, copied it, and gave it to his design team as the basis for Neytiri, the blue-skinned Na’vi warrior who would four years later serve as the emotional focal point of the highest-grossing movie ever made.
The lawsuit’s minor detail is what sticks out. A sketch in a frame. A note written by hand. My initial inspiration for Neytiri came from your beauty. Regretfully, you were filming a different film. Next time. Kilcher claims that when she received this from Cameron at an event in 2010, she interpreted it as most people would: as a kind gesture, a compliment, and perhaps the beginning of a future partnership. Her attorneys now contend that the note was completely different. They claim that her agent actually attempted to get her in front of casting but was rejected. If that is the case, the gift begins to resemble a paper trail rather than flattery.
She claims that an interview Cameron did late last year regarding the release of Avatar: Fire and Ash is what drove her to the legal system. According to reports, he cited her LA Times cover as the original source. It’s her. Her lower face. It must have felt weird to watch that video go viral online—like seeing the receipt for a transaction you weren’t aware you were involved in.
Arnold Peter, her lawyer, put it bluntly. He contended that Cameron’s actions lacked inspiration. The process was extraction. Here, the word counts. Inspiration is a gentle, forgiving force. The language of mining is extraction, which is mechanical and industrial. Naturally, the humans in Avatar are destroying the Na’vi homeland through mining.
There’s a sense that this case may end up being more about the biometric issue that currently looms over the entertainment industry than it is about Cameron in particular. Studios are using voice archiving, facial scanning, and performance-based model training. For any of it, the legal framework is still only partially constructed. A judge could make a limited decision regarding publicity rights and ignore the more general issues. Or in five years, this might become the case that everyone brings up.
Disney has not responded. Cameron hasn’t said anything. Saldaña, who has been using motion capture to inhabit Neytiri for fifteen years, finds himself in an uncomfortable position. She is not named in the lawsuit, and none of that is her fault. However, there is discomfort.
It’s difficult to ignore the symmetry. An Indigenous people’s struggle to maintain their rights is depicted in the movie. An Indigenous adolescent claims that during the process of making it, she experienced the same thing off-camera.
