Based on the adventures of an obscure DC Comic character, Jonah Hex tells the story of a badly scarred bounty hunter (played by Josh Brolin) tracking down terrorist Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), who is preparing to unleash hell on earth.

For maker-up department head Christen Tinsley, the film represented a massive amount of work. "The build was very extensive," he said, "because it wasn't just about designing Jonah Hex and some of the other key characters that are wearing prosthetics. My goal was designing the entire look of the film, from the background and supporting actors to everybody, because I wanted the whole aesthetic to have a rhyme and reason. So often on big films you have somebody running the make-up department, which is separate from the prosthetics, which is separate from the creatures, but with my history, the studio accepted the fact that I could handle all of it. That allowed me a lot of freedom that people don't usually have, because I was not only creating everything out of my studio but I was also developing all of the characters with the casting director and with the director and the producers from the ground up."

Despite the workload, Tinsley actually had a relatively small team. "There were just three of us in the make-up department," he said, "Plus additional help on the big days. We brought small groups of people from my studio to wrangle the larger days, but for the most part, it was just the three of us wrangling everything. There's a range of characters and because it's a period piece, it's post Civil War, there's an underlying tone of facial-hair work and there's certain grime and grittiness to the skin and making sure everybody's very believable."

That said, the world of Jonah Hex is also one of heightened reality "Everybody is a designed character," said Tinsley, "and that's what is so fabulous about this film. We have Michael Shannon playing a character called Doc Cross and I pitched the idea of giving him psoriasis, red flaky skin and the studio said, 'Great, we've never seen a character like that: that makes him even creepier!'

"Turnbull, our villain in the film [played John Malkovich] has this prosthetic nose that he wears, with a horrible scar running down the center of that nose. So Malkovich had a wig, a prosthetic nose, a full paint job to give him that worn, leathery skin and dentures. Probably 20 on the cast members are wearing dentures. That was a through-line where I said, "Nobody can have pretty teeth!"

In the end though, the most memorable character of the film is Hex himself. As Tinsley explained, "Jonah Hex is a horribly scarred victim with a hole in one side of his face that exposes his back molar teeth and everything else, so the obvious challenge was, "How do we do that?" "From the get-go, the studio did not want to put a dime into the digital aspect, which I was glad to hear, but it also made my job a lot harder. We did some internal tests at my studio and came up with some ideas that we discussed with Josh, because it was going to be an obvious discomfort to him throughour the 45 days of shooting, but Josh, being as gracious as he is said, "You know, it's got to be right and it's got to be Jonah Hex, and that's a part of what it is, so let's go for it!" I think the final result is very Impressive."