James Cameron and the Walt Disney Company are facing a lawsuit that claims the director based a key character in the Avatar franchise on a teenage actor without her permission.

The suit, filed by actor Q’orianka Kilcher, alleges that Cameron “extracted her facial features” and “directed his design team” to base the key Avatar character Neytiri on her appearance after seeing her in an LA Times advert for Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World. In the film Kilcher, who is Native Peruvian, played Pocahontas among a cast that also included Colin Farrell and Christian Bale.

A release about the lawsuit says 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 describes the multibillion-dollar grossing Avatar series as a franchise that “presented itself as sympathetic to Indigenous struggles, all while silently exploiting a real Indigenous youth behind the scenes”. The character of Neytiri is played in the Avatar films by Zoe Saldaña.

The release goes on to describe a meeting between Kilcher and Cameron in 2010, after the first Avatar film’s release. At an event, the director told the actor that he had a gift for her: a framed sketch of Neytiri that he had personally drawn and signed. Along with the sketch, Kilcher says that Cameron gave her a note that read, “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time.”

The lawsuit claims that Cameron had not attempted to book Kilcher for the project, despite her agent’s efforts to get her the opportunity to read for a role.

“Millions of people opened their hearts to Avatar because they believed in its message and I was one of them,” says Kilcher. “I never imagined that someone I trusted would systematically use my face as part of an elaborate design process and integrate it into a production pipeline without my knowledge or consent. That crosses a major line. This act is deeply wrong.”

The lawsuit states that Kilcher only learned that Cameron had used her facial features so directly after an interview clip of the director began circulating on social media last year. In the video, Cameron stands with the Neytiri sketch, 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.”

Kilcher’s lead counsel said in a press release that Cameron’s strategy 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.”

The Guardian has reached out to Cameron’s representatives for comment.