With voting open for this year’s Oscars, we’re taking a closer look at some of the craftspeople nominated for the year’s best films—from the people who re-created the golden age of Hollywood for the Coen Brothers to the makeup artist who redefined a pop-culture icon. Check VanityFair.com every day this week for another close-up look at 2017’s Oscar nominees.

In 2015, Warner Bros. hired makeup artist Alessandro Bertolazzi for the most intimidating challenge of his three-decade career: making over the Joker, a pop culture icon, for Suicide Squad. Granted, the supervillain (played this time by Jared Leto) did not get as much screen time as the film’s titular team. But as the most-famous character featured in Suicide Squad, the 67-year-old, green-haired villain, who has appeared in thousands of comic books and been famously portrayed onscreen by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, was the speculative fixation of many comic fans. (Bertolazzi was startled to discover that the Internet was already guessing how his Suicide Squad Joker would look before he started work on the film.) So, how did Bertolazzi prep for the much-anticipated makeover?

By starting from zero.

“Warner Bros. gave me all the comics to read,” explained Bertolazzi, who is nominated for an Oscar this month. “That didn’t help, because the character was too iconic, and looking through all the different looks would have been too complicated. They had already made an amazing, beautiful Joker before me [in The Dark Knight.] And now I had to create something that was different from the previous Jokers, but [incorporated] the rules and paid respect to the iconic Joker.”

Bertolazzi looked to director David Ayer for guidance, asking him, “Who is this guy in Suicide Squad? What is his story?” Ayer’s take: “He’s a poet. He’s in love—sick love, but still love.”

“So I tried to find something to make him super scary, but at the same time romantic,” said Bertolazzi. “He’s in love with Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), who is also crazy. I always loved that contrast of a poet, a romantic, and a devil all at the same time . . . He’s a bad, bad guy, but in the movie, he’s something different. He’s a virus jumping around and moving the story in Suicide Squad.”

“I also looked at the 1928 movie The Man Who Laughs, which was the inspiration for the Joker,” said Bertolazzi, describing the silent horror film adapted from Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name. (In it, actor Conrad Veidt gave his character a morbidly exaggerated grin—which the Joker not only borrowed but made his signature expression.) “The movie was so beautiful. So that what was my biggest inspiration for Joker, apart from the fact he was so sick and full of hate. I was also thinking that the Joker’s father might be a corpse.”

Bertolazzi gathered other inspirational materials, including everyday items—sawdust, wood, stone—photos, newspaper clippings, Internet images, and anything else that inspired him.

“I started to stick everything on a wall,” Bertolazzi said. Fittingly, he said, “My work room started to look like a crime scene. We start building this huge, criminal-case-like collage, and magically, I don’t know how, everything started to be connected—like a picture of David Bowie I found. Because for me, the best Joker of all time is David Bowie.”

When it came time to put makeup brush to skin, Bertolazzi and the filmmakers made the decision to keep the Joker separate from the rest of the Suicide Squad cast by putting everyone in separate makeup trailers.