When he saw Danny Trejo as the knife-throwing badass in Desperado while partying with friends, Brett Harvey was like a lot of young movie fans. His jaw dropped.

“Who the hell was that guy?” Harvey remembers thinking. “From then on he was basically referred to as that scary looking guy … you know the one from Desperado. Danny’s face at the time, it just look likes it’s been through about eight war battles. Just mean looking. He has a look of he’ll kill you, your brother, your sister, your mother.”

Decades later, Harvey, a Canadian documentary filmmaker, got the opportunity to meet Trejo. The goal was to convince the Los Angeles actor to let Harvey tell his life story. Harvey researched and wrote a hardcover pitch book to share with Trejo. After paging through the book, the star of Machete tapped on the it and agreed: this was the person to tell his story.

With Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo, Brett Harvey explores the details of Trejo’s childhood, experimentation with heroin, armed robberies, drug dealing and incarceration at numerous California state prisons. Then comes sobriety, working as a drug counselor to help others, and an accidental movie career, first as an extra in Runaway Train, then tiny roles as ex-con, inmate, or badass in many, many other movies. The title of the documentary comes from Trejo’s early film credits: he was often cast as Inmate #1.

Eventually, Trejo’s roles got bigger, which included his star turn as Machete, a 2010 movie directed by Robert Rodriguez. That movie began as a fake trailer (at about 8:07 in video) for Grindhouse, the 2007 Rodriguez - Quentin Tarantino collaboration.