"This is what you live for - to design something iconic that people remember," he said.
It was painted on to extras "and we both said this could be the most brilliant thing in the world or this could be the most stupid thing in the world".
Director and lead actor Mel Gibson saw the blue extras and asked for it to be applied for filming.
"The producers came and said: 'Are you stupid?' They said we had destroyed the movie and we said we thought we had made the movie.
"They said they would have to reshoot, and for two weeks they tried to replace us. But the enormity of the film - the set-up and budget and organisational process - was to too big for anybody to take over.
"So we stuck with it - we stuck with blue face - and at the end of the movie the classic line from the producers was: 'We'll make sure you will never work on a movie again'.
"A year later Braveheart was released and taken off the screens after about four days because it bombed, then they re-released it after spending about $30 million on publicity."
The producers that told him he would never work again informed him of his Academy Award nomination.
"They were my best friends."
After winning the award with Peter Frampton and Lois Burwel, he returned to his room that night before midnight.
"I sat there and talked to every relation and everybody I remembered from Essex. That was my celebration."
He left school at Southend-on-Sea aged 12.
"They were basically telling me to get out. They said there were going to get my father up and I thought that was great, because Dad will fix everything.
But his father, who left school aged nine, agreed with the principal.
"So we left. Finished, never to return. I was devastated."
He had a series of odd jobs and enjoyed none of them.
His father fell sick and could no longer work, but on a trip to London bumped into this former bandmaster from Scotland.
"He was now head of the Royal Australian Air Force band which needed a clarinet player.
"So we were the last of the ten pound Poms."
Aged 14 he did odd jobs such as a telegram boy for the Post Office and farm labouring.
His sister was succeeding as a hairdresser and his mother decided it might be a good profession for her son. His sister took him to a large salon in Melbourne where he was taken on as an apprentice.
He said the stereotype of male hairdressers was a fallacy.
"Eighty per cent of the guys were like me - a working-class background who just didn't fit into panel beating jobs. They were some of the roughest guys I have ever met.
"At the end of our apprenticeship we were walking through Melbourne - back in the time of skinheads - and some people on the street started to push us around.
"My friend Peter was a boxer from school, another Greek boy killed this time by weightlifting and I was from Essex. A fight happened and we ended up putting these guys through a plate glass window at Myer's."
Police were somewhat dubious when they confessed their profession.
He won apprentice of the year but returned to farm work.
"It wasn't really for me."
Friends were involved with an amateur theatre company and he helped with lighting and make up for Frankenstein, researching library books.
"That was the first time I actually felt there was something I was kind of interested in.
There was a job advertised by the Australian Broadcasting Commission for a makeup artist and was turned down but six months later it offered him a hairdressing job "but I had to stay for three years and be trained as a make-up artist and also a wigmaker".
For himself he started working on music videos, much of it in London with artists such as the B-52s, Adam and the Ants, Dolly Parton, Duran Duran, Iggy Pop and David Bowie.
"Video was big and we were all experimenting with crazy-stupid makeup like black eyes - we had a wild old time.
"I have to admit to myself I became star struck and wanted to work on at least one Hollywood movie, to know what it feels like."
A film production needed someone "tough enough to go into the jungle in Borneo for four months" and he worked on Farewell to the King starring Nick Nolte and directed by John Milius.
One movie led to another and he got a reputation "for doing difficult things" and he heard about Braveheart.
"My father had so many stories about Scotland and William Wallace. It was just a really weird coincidence."
For 45 years he has been an independent "gun for hire" makeup artist.
Each movie was a journey, taking up to four months at 100 hours a week, he said.
"I could get a phone call at any moment - the next minute, the next week or the next six months - and I never know where it is going to come from.
"I could go from catching a bus down here in Marine Parade to a private jet with all-expenses-paid."
The first phone call was usually from a producer who then sent a script. Several calls follow, asking for his vision on design and opinion on logistics.
"From a script I can work out things like if we will be shooting at night, in the studio, if it's going to be a difficult location, if the scene is going to take a lot of time to set up or a big special-effects set up, or if it has 2000 people in it. So I start to look at it as an organisational process not so much as a design process."
If the studio liked his artistic vision and logistical nous "then I might get an offer".
"That's when my agent plays bad cop and screws them for every cent she can, to make it worth my while to put my life on hold for months."
For Mad Max Fury Road he was hired for just the character Furiosa played by Charlize Theron.
"I locked into the idea of shaving her head, making her look beaten up. We have seen so many males being action heroes and - call a spade a spade - woman like to see a guy with a bit of blood and sweat looking tough and sexy.
"I said, 'Why can't we rough her up? If she is running around covered in blood I think men and women will find it sexy.
"So we ran with that, everybody was in agreement and the character Furioso was born before we started shooting."
With his Wellington-born wife and twin daughters he lives in the Napier suburb of Taradale. They have a house in Greece but his wife always wanted to live in Hawke's Bay and his family "love the place".
He never misses a TV episode of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's latest show, filmed at his restaurant on the end of the Southend-on-Sea pier.
"As a family a day out for us was to go down to the pier, jump on the train to the end where we would buy an icecream.
"It brings back the memories of sitting there as a young boy at the end of that pier. And I think of my journey since then."
