Earlier this week at this year’s SXSW, Nicolas Cage and his Leaving Las Vegas writer-director Mike Figgis publicly stated that they were never paid for the film, despite it winning him the Oscar for Best Actor back in 1996 and thus sparking a string of successes in the follow-up to his win, such as his roles in Con Air and Face/Off.

At the festival to promote Arcadian, the latest film the actor has been working on, Cage spoke about the lack of pay for Leaving Las Vegas with Business Insider saying,  “I haven’t been thinking about it…I got to play a part that I absolutely had to play. There was no doubt in my mind that it would be an experience and a great movie. I wasn’t going to stop — whether they paid me or not, I was making the movie.”

Similarly, a few years ago on the season three premiere of The Hollywood Reporter’s podcast, It Happened in Hollywood, Figgis revealed that he was never given his fee of $100,000 for directing the drama film. Speaking on Lumiere Pictures, the studio that financed the film for $4 million, Figgis commented, “They said the film never went into profit.”