Nicolas Cage has "zero idea" if Face/Off 2 is still happening after Adam Wingard dropped out.

The 62-year-old actor has revealed he and Wingard recently had a "terrific conversation" over lunch a few months after it was reported the director is no longer set to helm a sequel to the 1997 action movie.

Asked about the state of the project, Cage told Variety: "Listen, Adam and I had a great lunch together at the Smoke House in Burbank, and we had a terrific conversation.

"We share similar interests. I like what he's been doing with the "Godzilla" group, and we talked about one of our favourite supervillains in the old Godzilla movies, which was Hedorah.

"I'm sure at some point our paths will cross again. I don't know what happened, and I have zero idea if it's going to happen. I'm the last guy to know anything."

The original movie was directed by John Woo, starring Cage and John Travolta as freelance terrorist Castor Troy and federal agent Sean Archer respectively.

Troy ends up in a coma before he can reveal the location of his next attack, leading to Archer undergoing an experimental face-transplant procedure to pose as him and infiltrate a secret super-prison.

The terrorist awakes and makes the surgeons give him Archer's face and kills them, taking over the agent's life while he's stuck trying to escape from prison, where the drama really begins.

Reflecting on Travolta's performance, the Spider-Noir actor added: "He did a great job in that movie.

"I'm only Castor for the first 12 minutes -- but what an opening it is -- and then he took the ball and ran with it beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

"He really had fun with it. I like to think that I liberated him a little bit. I set the template, and he riffed on it and took it."

Wingard - known for his work on the likes of 2011's You're Next, the Blair Witch sequel in 2016, and both 2021's Godzilla vs. Kong and its 2024 follow-up Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire - had been attached to helm a sequel for a while.

However, Collider reported in February that he was no longer on board, with the project switching to an open directing assignment.

This essentially means filmmakers can make their own pitches with the aim of developing the project and ushering it towards production.

The sequel was first announced back in 2021, and Cage - whose character Troy appears to die at the end of the original film - insisted he was open to finding a way to return.

He told Collider in 2023: "I think Face/Off is a sequel that lends itself to a lot of twists and turns and unpredictability.

"It's almost like if you factor in the idea of offspring and Castor and Sean having children and these children grow up, then it becomes like three-dimensional chess, and then it's not just the two, John Travolta and myself, it's four of us ping-ponging and going at different levels, and it becomes even more complex.

"I think there's a lot of fertile ground there."