‘They Still Haunt Us’: How Los Javis Turned Lorca’s Unfinished Play Into La Bola Negra

Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi did not set out to make a small film. Speaking during a post-screening Q&A attended by The Nerd Wire on Oct. 19, the directing duo known as Los Javis described the moment La bola negra (The Black Ball) stopped being a period drama and became a dare.

“When I read the first draft that we wrote for the first time, I was like, ‘Hmm, maybe this could be an opportunity to show the world that LGBTQ+ stories are not niche, that are meant to be universal,’” one of the two said near the end of the conversation. “And so we went for it when we were shooting, and we wanted to create the gayest, biggest, wonderful movie ever.”

Five months after its Cannes premiere, that sounds less like bravado than a forecast. The film earned Calvo and Ambrossi the Best Director prize in Cannes’ main competition (shared with Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland), took the People’s Choice Award at Toronto and the audience award at San Sebastián, and is Spain’s official submission for the International Feature Oscar. Netflix opened it in four U.S. theaters on Oct. 16 — two in New York, two in Los Angeles — and plans to expand it on Oct. 23 and go wide on Nov. 6 before a Dec. 2 streaming debut. “You’re playing in four theaters right now,” the moderator told the panel. “Please spread the word.”

Four pages Lorca never finished

The film didn’t begin with Federico García Lorca. It began with a play about the man he loved.

“We fell in love with a play called La piedra oscura by Alberto Conejero,” Los Javis said. “The play is about the relationship of Rafael and Sebastián, and it’s only the last night of Rafael. It’s a very intense and a very intimate and fragile play.”

Rafael is Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, Lorca’s companion and the secretary of his touring theater company, La Barraca, who was killed in August 1937, a year after Lorca was executed. Conejero’s 2015 play imagines his final hours in the company of a young soldier named Sebastián. (Conejero shares screenwriting credit on the film with Calvo and Ambrossi.)

Inside that play was a door. “At some point in the play, they talk about the unfinished works by Federico García Lorca,” they said. “So we got intrigued, and we were researching about that, and we found out that La bola negra is a play that Federico couldn’t finish because he was killed. There’s only four pages that exist.”

As Los Javis described them, those pages hold a list of characters Lorca intended to use — a man named Carlos, his mother, his father, friends — and then something stranger. “At some point it becomes magical,” they said. “The skiers, the snow.”

That was the spark: adapt Conejero’s play, imagine the world Lorca never got to write, and then do something neither text asked for. “We realized that this is the story of us, of our recent past in Spain,” they said. “So we wanted to create also a present storyline to talk about how much the past informed the present. And we wanted to pay tribute to all the people that came before us, especially the LGBT-plus community. Our rights are based on a lot of suffering, and we wanted to pay tribute to them.”

The result runs on three tracks: Carlos in 1932 Granada, Rafael and Sebastián in 1937, and Alberto (Carlos González) in 2017, piecing together what his family left behind.

The poem on the whiteboard

Spoiler warning: this section discusses the film’s ending.

For a long stretch of writing, the directors said, they had a whiteboard covered in posters, pages and photographs of actors they hadn’t yet cast — and no ending. One of the pictures was of Milo Quifes, who would eventually play Carlos. “We didn’t know Milo. We had a picture of you,” they told him from the stage. “You one day came home and said, ‘Am I in your movie?’ We were like, ‘Yes.’”

Also on the board, the whole time, was the poem Sebastián reads with Lorca in the film’s closing sequence — not a Lorca original but, according to co-writer Conejero, a romance written for the film in his style. “The last line of the poem is, ‘Beware, they still haunt us,’” they said. “One day we didn’t have the ending, and one day we came to the whiteboard and saw the poem, and it was so fitting that the last line, it was that — with the marching of victory with Sebastián, with Carlos dying, and with Alberto feeling all that shame, all that pain, like still in the present time.”

“It’s funny how poetry is so polysemic,” they added. “When you go back to a poem, then it resonates in a new and different and unique way. And it resonated that way: they still haunt us. Hate and intolerance is still there. It was fitting to tell this story right now.”

The moderator put it more bluntly: “In a way, I wish it wasn’t so timely. But it is.”

End of spoilers.

A lead actor with no script

Sebastián is played by Guitarricadelafuente — the Spanish singer-songwriter born Álvaro Lafuente — in his first acting role. Los Javis, by their own admission, were fans first.

“One day in a music festival, in Primavera Sound, we approached him and said, ‘Do you wanna make a movie with us?’” they said. “And he thought we were talking about music. He said, ‘Making the music?’ No, no, no — be in the lead role.” When they finally sat down for a proper meeting and he asked to see the script, there wasn’t one. “We wanted to write this for him,” they said. “We had the whole idea, but we wanted it to be a gift of admiration to his work.”

They also needed what he brings on stage. “When you’re writing about history, and especially the Civil War in Spain, you wanna remove dust from that,” they said. “He has that thing that is very crisp and cool, and you wanna watch him forever.”

For the musician, the leap was less foreign than it sounds. “Every time that you are playing a song, you are embodying somebody else,” Guitarricadelafuente said. “I really felt kind of this approach when Sebastián got to me.” He’d dreamed of acting as a kid, and the project arrived at a moment when he saw himself in the character. “It was like a gift that came from heaven, because I got to suddenly find so many parallelisms with what I was living at that moment — and actually try to find things in yourself that you didn’t want to confront and put those to the character. I thought that was just a very cathartic moment.”

The directors made sure the exhaustion on screen was real. “We used to make him run up the stairs, down the stairs, get him exhausted,” one of the directors said. “And then, action — you come in front of the camera, because Sebastián was feeling exhausted, lonely.” One take went further than planned. “One day he just smashed the window, cut himself. And he was like, ‘It was fine, right? It was so real.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, you have hurt yourself.’” The take, they confirmed, is in the finished film.

‘We both said the eyes’

Miguel Bernardeau carries the 1937 story largely from a bed, and the directors said casting him required the thing they hate most. “Miguel did an audition for this role, even though we wanted him,” one of them said. “We hate auditions. I hate that, because I love to give a contract of trust to the actors. But we needed that, because it was gonna be [Guitarricadelafuente’s] first role, so we needed to be sure about Rafael.”

They put the two actors in a room and had Guitarricadelafuente read the poem. “When he read the poem, we saw Miguel’s face,” they said, “and we understood he was Rafael.” What they needed, they explained, was an actor who works from the inside: “He was gonna be on a bed the whole movie. So you need that kind of working from the inside that you can tell in his eyes.”

Bernardeau said playing a real man raised the stakes. “I felt a greater sense of responsibility, but also because of the history and time that we were speaking of,” he said, “and because Federico’s soul is in the whole movie in a way, so it was like paying homage also to him.” Of his directors: “I think they’re the best directors of actors in the world, probably. … They allow you to be so free in these very specific boundaries they create, being so informed and ready and prepared for the project, and confident on their talent, that you as an actor, you feel like you can jump in and really risk and fail many times, because the eye behind the lens … has a really good taste and criteria.”

The chemistry, it turns out, came from an instruction so simple it sounds like a dare. “I remember I told them in the first scene, ‘You just have to think about something you like about the other. Just give me that for this,’” one of the directors said. “And I asked Álvaro and Miguel, ‘Just think about one thing. Only one specific thing you like about the other. Just think about it when you’re saying the lines.’ And it was magical, because they were meant to be together.”

One of the two actors filled in the rest: “I think we both said the eyes.”

A sing-along, courtesy of the junket

Carlos González, who plays Alberto, answered in Spanish through the panel’s interpreter, and his remarks here are translated. Working opposite Lola Dueñas as Alberto’s mother, he said, meant half the job was already done — she is, in his estimation, one of the best actresses in Europe. His own preparation came down to breathing. Every time he tried to bring something personal into the role, he said, it didn’t help, because there are things he still needs to cry about, while Alberto had long since cried for that mother; what was left for the character was frustration.

He’d never met Julio Torres, who plays Alberto’s boyfriend Juan Pablo, before the film. So Los Javis took him to London for a day — his first time in the city — to see Torres’s stage show (the one “with the colors,” the panel said, which is Color Theories), have dinner and take photographs in character to hang in the couple’s house on screen. “Julio Torres is like a kid,” he said, in The Nerd Wire’s translation. “He wants to play, he wants to have fun the whole time. He’s a beautiful person, and I love his eyes.” Asked whether he became a fan, González answered that Torres became a fan of him.

Then, after a full day of back-to-back interviews, he asked the room’s forgiveness for wanting to stop being serious about war and just have some fun — and started singing, pulling the interpreter in for a second voice. It was, the moderator noted, a musical interlude.

Finding Lorca inside La bola negra

Milo Quifes, making his first screen appearance as Carlos, also spoke through the interpreter. With only four pages of Lorca’s play to go on — a character list and a scene with the sister, played in the film by Natalia de Molina — he spent the summer reading Lorca “as if there were no tomorrow” (our translation): the poetry, the plays, Ian Gibson’s Lorca y el mundo gay. It was the first screenplay he’d ever read, and he described the thrill of spotting Lorca Easter eggs inside it — this bit from Blood Wedding, that one from Yerma — and then of watching a stage direction as bare as “Carlos dances” turn into the finished sequence. “It’s really fun to discover Lorca inside La bola negra,” he said, “and at the same time La bola negra inside Lorca’s work.”

The directors said he never missed a take, and that a mountain scene cost him the feeling in one hand after lying in the snow. González added one more thought: that somebody out there is going to discover Federico García Lorca for the first time because of this film struck him, he said, as something enormous.

Which brings it back to that first draft. “We’re happy that people is … connecting with the story,” Los Javis said. “I hope the queer stories could be for everyone.”

La bola negra is in theaters in New York and Los Angeles now, expands Oct. 23 and goes wide Nov. 6 before streaming on Netflix beginning Dec. 2.

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