James Cameron has revealed that he shot early test footage for Avatar with Lost star Yunjin Kim.
Speaking to Popular Mechanics, the filmmaker said that he convinced studio 20th Century Fox to spend $10 million so that he could film the scene where protagonist Jake Sully first meets Na'vi alien Neytiri.
"We shot a five-minute scene," Cameron said of the early prep work. "I hired two actors, turns out one of them is now quite well-known - Yunjin Kim who is in Lost. There was Yunjin and a guy named Daniel Best. I took these two young actors and just did the scene. From that we took 40 seconds, because that's all we could afford, and had [visual effects studio] ILM take it through to a finished product."
Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington went on to fill Kim and Best's roles when the sci-fi blockbuster eventually went into production.
Source: Popular Mechanics