Sinners | Vampire Makeup FX | Behind The Scenes | Warner Bros. Entertainment

I've always wanted to do a vampire film and I've always wanted to do one in New Orleans, so when I got the call there was no way around it. We were doing it. I'm Mike Fontaine and I'm a prosthetic makeup designer and I'm working on the final death design of Remic. I first became aware of Michael Fontaine when I watched a film called Green Room. I hadn't been that viscerally moved by makeup since I saw the thing, I think, and it kind of like left a, you know, left a mark on me. So Green Room was one of the inspirations for our movie. Ryan and I were having a conversation early on and I started to get a sense of what his vision was from the film. The process for me always starts with the script and initial images that come to mind and we work together to really find a point of view for what the designs will be. He really got the movie, you know, got what we were trying to achieve. It became very clear in the beginning that Ryan didn't want to hold back. He kind of just let me go for it and he never stifled the creativity. He only just encouraged it and let us go bold and do all this really wild stuff that I wasn't sure in the beginning if we'd be able to do. I'll usually create something and show him and he'll come back with an idea and once we hone that in, the process turns into drawing and painting and sculpting, designing. That process takes several months. Once he signs off on the sculpture, it goes to New York and there's an amazing team that works around the clock to make molds and to cast these pieces into silicone that then will be brought to set in New Orleans. These are what Sammy's claw mark prosthetics look like when they come shipped. So here we have Sammy's lip prosthetics. It's made out of this very, very thin silicone. This is the piece that goes on Miles' lip to kind of create the shape that his lip is swollen and split down the middle. I personally hate real violence. I can't stand it. But for me, this is sort of an abstraction. I always go back to like the art side of it where it's the colors and the texture over it being a wound. So you see like reds and purples and yellows and oranges. And then you can see how he sculpted the piece and you can see where like skin is supposed to be heavy here. Like if you're scratched, you have more weight hanging and then there's some like skin that would protrude out. So if you don't really think about it as a wound, it's not as disturbing. I'm just interested in what will be interesting artistically. You know, if there's a wound, how can that shape be almost a beautiful shape or something that is compositionally balanced? And if there's blood, you know, how can the blood be a pattern that is almost like a, you know, impressionistic painting? For the bite wounds, I was looking at animal attacks. You know, what happens when, you know, something like a shark bites someone's skin? We were studying real burns and, you know, some of the stuff was really gruesome, but I went more to reality than stuff that was referential from movies. A lot of blood, a lot of bites, a lot of thinking on your toes on this show. It's going to be a really cool movie. Can I say the craziest thing that I had to work through? Probably the blood, for sure. It didn't quite resonate. Okay, you're doing a horror film. There's going to be blood. Yeah, of course, it's a horror movie. There's going to be blood everywhere. You don't really realize how intrusive the blood is. You got to reapply it, you know, and it dries on you, and it's extremely uncomfortable. I didn't even know I had a pet peeve as much as I do about fake blood. I do, but I got through it. I tell you, seeing my clothes bloodied wasn't easy. There's a lot of blood. There's gallons and gallons of blood. There's, you know, bloods that are formulated to be used in the mouth. There's bloods that are made to be pumped through tubes. There's, you know, bloods that dry on the skin and flake off. So pretty much every fake blood product that we could think of has somehow made its way into the film. Today's sticky. Sticky business. Going to the bathroom is an escapade. The blood is very sticky, but it's really cool because I don't really have to care about like how I look. I feel like there's a lot of freedom in just being covered in blood and sweat. It's been a bonding experience for all of us, cast and crew alike. One of the challenges of this film in particular is that there is such a large cast, and almost everyone in the cast goes through some form of transformation or injury. Everyone has to go through a very elaborate process of all of this stuff being built and being made custom for each character. Just a little bite. I mean, it wasn't that bad. It was a little nibble. And keeping track of the continuity of what happens between all these injuries in the course of one night and then filming out of order is really challenging. But he also has this rare ability to still move on the fly because I get a lot of ideas in a moment. He was able to improvise better than anybody I'd ever met in that line of work. Becoming a vampire, not something I maybe thought I saw myself having to do, but man was it cool. I mean, when I first showed up with my bite, Ryan almost threw up, which I was like, sorry, get it together. You wrote this. The cast has been unbelievable with the makeup. They looked at it as something that was fun and something that was adding to their character. It definitely informs and it definitely lends a whole array of things that you can't really account for until it's on. Remic, he's always putting on a front. So for me, Jack's normal face is the mask. And the makeup, the prosthetics, it's not adding something to his face, it's taking away. So it was all about peeling back the layers of what Remic is. So I wanted to almost excavate the vampire, that his face is being torn away. Even though makeup is an additive process, we're trying to create the illusion that it's subtractive. And as the film goes on, the facade breaks down more and more and more until the end, we see what he really is, which is something that's barely human at all. In this stage, Jack will be wearing this piece and he'll have fangs that actually go over his mouth that this piece will blend into. And there'll be a plate on his head that a resonator will be attached to. So there's a lot of elements going on. The teeth change the arrangement of your face in a way that you can explore and lean into for the role. I lived for the teeth and the lenses and the blood. The contacts themselves are the most stunning things you'll ever see. They're hand-painted and the detail is so insane. And then you put them in and that's a whole other story. Because the pupil's covered, Nathan can't see in them. So Nathan is quite a trooper here, putting up with all of our torture. I couldn't see because those lenses, you just, you can't see out those lenses. They're very specific colored lenses. I had to be guided on set. Put up the dance with the contacts, you know, the Irish scene. I can barely dance when I can see, you know what I mean? A very early conversation I had with Ryan, he talked about something called tapetum lucidum, which is the reflective quality that you'll see in animals' eyes sometimes at night. Like a cat will look like it has glowing eyes. So he wanted to do this in the vampires. And I thought it would be really cool to do that practically with a contact lens. But no one's ever done that before. The only person I could think of that would be worth asking something like that is Christina Patterson. And Christina came back and said that she's actually been secretly working on developing that exact effect in a contact lens for a long time now, and that she's just at the cusp of perfecting it. She had these reflective lenses that actually bounce light back, and it looked amazing. It looked beautiful and terrifying at the same time. The most interesting prosthetic, I think, is Cornbread, because he gets shot in the face and his whole jaw is missing. How do you actually hide someone's jaw in this thing that makes it look like his jaw is gone? It was my first time using prosthetics. The one that I wear is like a muzzle. You can't move your mouth, you can barely breathe. I'm sure it looks cool, but functionality is rough. We kind of reconstructed Omar's face in a way that still looks like his face, but is actually in a completely different area than where his face actually is. So it was almost like his face was built out. And that created this illusion of depth. Here we go in three, two, one, action! I really was excited when I saw Omar stand up in the doorway and all the blood came spilling out onto his costume. Right now, we're working on the Remick burn double. We've created a burn suit. It's basically a combination of prosthetics and a suit. All of this is hand-painted. We have airbrush and there's plastic layers that are actually burned that we lay on top. Lauren here is going in and bringing some of these things to life. We have burned pieces of plastic and burned fabric and silicone, foam rubber and all these different materials, hair. And everything has been glued together and layered to kind of create this translucent burn effect. To be witnessing that level of expertise and artistry that Mark Fontaine and his team were doing on a daily basis, it was mind-blowing every day. He's a true artist, man. He sculpts at night, always iterating. I just love working with him and I can't wait for people to see, you know, what he was able to do on this. I wanted to really bring the horror element. That's what I was excited about and that's what I felt like a big part of my responsibility was on this. To me, the cast and crew around you, that's the first audience. I want to walk on the set and have everyone react to what they're looking at. Whether they're excited about it or scary, it doesn't matter. There's a reaction there. That's what I'm really going for. Let's go to bed. I'm tired.