We all know that Cameron took years to develop the revolutionary technology that went into creating Avatar's blue people. But did you know that he used Yunjin Kim from Lost in early test footage?
Early on, when they were doing preliminary tests of the technology, Cameron and his crew realized that the on-screen avatars needed to closely resemble the live-action actors. They had shot prototype footage with Yunjin Kim from "Lost" as Neytiri. The results were not good.Whoa. I know it was just supposed to be test footage, but what if Avatar had starred Yunjin Kim, instead of Zoe Saldana, as Neytiri? I wasn't the biggest fan of Avatar, but who knows? I might have found it a lot more interesting knowing that a Korean American actress was playing everybody's favorite blue-skinned femalien warrior... in the highest-grossing movie of all time. I'm just saying.
"Her eyes and her expressions, the way her mouth formed speech, just didn't translate that well, " Cameron said. "We had no way of knowing whether it was an accurate performance, and it struck us as important for the character to physically resemble the actor as closely as possible, especially the mouth. I cast people I wanted the characters to look like, and then we did laser scans of them, cyber scans, physical busts, plaster molds of their faces. Everything was done in the way you develop physical makeup, and then given to the CG guys to scan and bring to life."