ASH WEDNESDAY DAY

Photos: July 8, 2006. First day of shooting with Ramiro Briones (Ash). The scar looked so weak we had to reshoot a closeup on his face months later.
The second pic displays the makeup that we used to make the scar look real. We used nose and scar wax, matte foundation (to match the actor's skin) and a sculpting tool... Paco quickly mastered the art of making the scar, so he became the official scar guy... The few times that I did it, it looked like crap...
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Today is ASH WEDNESDAY... I mean for real...
It is a day observed by Western Christians, and it marks the first day of lent.
In mass a priest puts a cross on your forehead of ash, and it is to remind us that "Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris." meaning "Remember, man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return."

HECTOR MATA, our Ash Wednesday puts a cross of blood (on their foreheads, if it is still attached to the face) on everyone he kills... I guess his message is "chingatus madreis" meaning "I am putting a cross of blood on your forehead, because the movie will look much cooler, and I want to be different than all of the other crime bosses in other films..." or something like that... :-D

SO, how the hell did we come up ASH WEDNESDAY (the character)?
Well, as we were beginning to write (very early on), I had an acquaintance that happened to have a birthmark on his forehead and I swear he looked as if he had gone to church on ash wednesday, BUT EVERYDAY!!!
I always thought to myself, that the only day he must feel normal was today, on ash wednesday.

SO, I had an idea to make a hitman character called ASH, because he had a birthmark on his forehead...
ANYWAY, as everything started evolving, I decided to have the crime boss as ASH... HOWEVER, later on, we changed his birthmark into a scar. With a scar we could now add a really healthy backstory, of HOW he actually got the scar and so on... and ended up being one of the coolest scenes in the movie...
Our only dilemma was to actually make the scar look real, but after multiple tests we got it right and we moved on...

"Listen Dama, if I find out that you had something to do with this, I am going to rip your heart out and feed it to your kids..."
-Ash Wednesday, scene 48