Denzel Washington took a massive pay cut to make sure his new movie Flight got off the ground.

The Oscar-winning actor plays a troubled pilot in the new drama and he was so desperate to get the film made, he took home a fraction of his usual multi-million dollar salary.

Washington reveals director Robert Zemeckis also took a huge pay cut as they struggled to land financing for the film.

He tells Deadline.com, "It was not a struggle to get it made, but the studio wanted to do it for a price, and we ended up with (about) $28 million, and Robert Zemeckis made it look like $100 million, especially the plane sequence. So he and I threw our money back in the pot, took a tenth of our salaries... It's a tenth of my salary. You do the math (sic)...

"Nowadays the studios are tightening their belts, and they knew it was a project we wanted to do. And I think they were smart, they said, 'Look, we don't want to spend more than, whatever it was, $28 million, $30 million.' And neither of us wanted to walk away from it, so we did it."