How ‘La Bola Negra’’s Costume and Production Designers Crafted Its Sensuous Universe

After nearly a decade of making visionary, queer-centric work, Spanish filmmakers Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known together as Los Javis, have reached dizzying new heights with La Bola Negra, inspired by the life and work of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca.

The film centers on Sebastián (singer Guitarricadelafuente), Carlos (Milo Quifes), and Alberto (Carlos González)—three gay men living in 1932, 1937, and 2017, respectively—who are connected by one of Lorca’s unfinished plays, La Bola Negra. Blending historical narrative, fiction, and fantasy as it explores how shame and resilience can be a kind of inheritance, the hyper-stylized epic is Calvo and Ambrossi’s most ambitious work to date. So, too, is it a major achievement for Los Javis’ collaborators Ana Cobos, La Bola Negra’s costume designer, and Roger Bellés, who headed production design.

“They wanted a period movie—with all the qualities, with all the textures—but they didn’t want a period movie in the way that you would see on a Pinterest [board]. They wanted their own period movie,” says Bellés, who previously worked with Calvo and Ambrossi on the 1980s-set miniseries La Mesías. Rather than design era-perfect sets, Bellés says, his job was to deliver locations that felt lived-in—beginning with Sebastián’s small village, which, in the opening sequence set in 1937, is reduced to a pile of rubble by Italian bomber planes deployed in the Spanish Civil War.

“After considering lots of possibilities, we started exploring real villages that were abandoned or half-abandoned. And we found a village on the border between Cantabria and Burgos, a zone that changed hands in the Spanish Civil War lots of times. So we designed the set considering this,” Bellés says. The team envisioned a town that had been fought over not only by armies, but by neighbors, too.

“We built our new town on the ruins of the other one, using parts of things existing, restoring some sites that were abandoned, and doing a lot of field work. So we started very big, but not in a, with all due respect, ‘studio way’ big—big in a way that we made something on a very human scale,” he says.

That style of working would carry on throughout the filmmaking process. The bombed church where Sebastián scales an oversized statue of his saintly namesake before falling in with the Nationalist army was a real sanctuary corroded by the elements. The hospital near the front at Santander, where he is then assigned to guard a dashing Republican captive (played by Miguel Bernardeau), was an abandoned seminary earmarked for renovations by the local government. And the theater where Penélope Cruz’s Nené performs cabaret for the Nationalist troops was a dilapidated cinema that had been closed since the 1950s. “It was totally ruined, vandalized, and full of hundreds of pigeons,” the production designer says, joking that when they found the venue, he thought: “It’s the worst place in the world, but it’s the kind of magic we need.”

For each location—including the streets of Granada, where Carlos’s story, set in the summer of 1932, takes place—the team first devised a layered backstory to guide their design work, and then focused on creating functioning spaces where extras could appear to go about their daily lives. “In period movies, usually, background actors are doing period things. But we wanted a street in Granada to feel similar to what [it would] feel like now: alive with people,” says Bellés, alluding to Carlos’s storyline, which begins with the character walking through the city to the casino he’s petitioned for membership at his father’s behest. For example, although Bellés built the interior of the casino in a tent-like structure outside Madrid, in the richly decorated boardroom, featuring a mural of the Sierra Nevada, he added scaffolding where painters could perch to watch the goings-on.

But it was the natural surroundings, more than anything, that helped Bellés achieve the effect he was after. “Again, it goes against all the ways of doing it, because it’s three times more complicated,” he says of working outside a studio backlot. “But when you see the real sun, the real olive trees, the real sky in the windows, when you see the wind coming in, you understand the actors are feeling the summer—not in front of a green screen in an air-conditioned studio.”

Like Bellés, Cobos approached the costumes for La Bola Negra with a deep understanding of Calvo and Ambrossi’s vision and an obsession with craftsmanship—as well as highly specific historical and artistic references and a unique palette suited to each timeline.

For the 2017 timeline, set in Madrid and Cantabria, where Alberto’s grandfather leaves behind an inheritance that links the three protagonists, the costume designer looked to Xavier Dolan’s queer romance Matthias & Maxime (2019). She outfitted Spanish actress Lola Dueñas, who plays Alberto’s mother, Teresa, in revealing tanks and skirts reminiscent of the clothing worn by working-class moms in Dolan’s films. For Alberto’s partner, played by Julio Torres, and his gaggle of partying friends, Cobos mixed items from the actors’ own wardrobes with playful pieces befitting a cool, queer social set. And in Alberto’s own costuming, she embraced González’s vision of a buttoned-up young historian who styles himself after Philip Seymour Hoffman, pairing carefully chosen basics with a pair of glasses once worn by González’s grandfather.

For 1937, which is dominated by shades of green, blue, khaki, and sand, Cobos looked to Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999), a sensual psychological drama about French Foreign Legionnaires in Djibouti. “I went mad trying to find military shirts that had the proper green,” she says, explaining that the department heads agreed that, instead of the “dead kind of green” used for Nationalist uniforms of the era, the timeline should feature richer tones reminiscent of those in Denis’s film.

“In Spain, there have been a lot of Civil War movies. In fact, when I was preparing, I had a very hard time finding clothes from the 1930s because there were several other projects being shot [simultaneously] about the war. So we wanted it to have a more Eastern European look—to have that vivid color that 35mm would give the clothes—but to make it more contemporary,” Cobos says. “And also the directors said, ‘We want a sensual feeling to go through all of the timelines of the movie. We want skin, we want the desire that the characters are feeling to be felt by whoever watches it.’ So they wanted more playful looks for the soldiers, who at the end of the day are just kids.”

To get the right look, the costumers tailored various pieces for each actor playing a Nationalist soldier and custom-made undergarments, pajamas, and bandages for Bernardeau that uniquely flattered his imposing physique. But it’s the luxurious, figure-hugging ensembles Cobos designed to help transform Cruz into a cupletista—a specialist in risqué cuplé songs—that steal the show. Even surrounded by nubile male extras, when Cruz appears in a plunging, embellished white gown for Nené’s first number or a powerful military coverall based on ’90s Mugler for a performance involving a real tank, it’s hard to focus on anything else.

Carlos’s tailor-made suiting is similarly striking. Inspired by the fact that, in 1932, men customarily wore either very dark or very pale-colored suits, depending on the season, Cobos stuck to black, or near-black, and white for Carlos’s clothing, as well as the items worn by his family and the members of the casino. The team’s 23-year-old in-house expert in men’s tailoring, Mario Vidal, also cut Carlos’s jackets to be wide on the shoulders and tight at the waist, adding further drama with exaggerated lapels. Cobos explains that, as with Nené’s ensembles, following period conventions to the letter didn’t necessarily make sense for Carlos’s wardrobe. “I wanted to have a special touch that [isn’t obvious] from the beginning,” she says.

In Bellés’s estimation, everyone involved with the film immersed themselves in the details, committing to whatever their role was with something like abandon. And from the department heads to the lower-level crew and niche collaborators, including a handwriting expert who spent months studying the four surviving pages of Lorca’s La Bola Negra to be able to mimic the writer’s “Ls, Fs, and points,” everyone understood how important it was to Calvo and Ambrossi that the film honor its subject: “They wanted to give gravitas to everything.”

La Bola Negra is currently in theaters. It will stream on Netflix from December 2.