Los Javis салсныхаа дараа Оскарт нэр дэвших төлөвтэй кино бүтээв

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In their native Spain, the filmmakers Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi are so famous that they’re referred to via Brangelina-style shorthand: Los Javis. Until last year they were romantic partners for more than a decade, together serve as judges on the Spanish edition of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and have faces of such sharp angularity that they look as if they’ve stumbled off the set of Zoolander. And now they’re the darlings of Hollywood. A Best Director nomination at next year’s Oscars is practically nailed on at this point, for their time-hopping, nearly three-hour-long gay epic La Bola Negra, which arrives in cinemas this week. It is, unquestionably, a very big deal.

“It’s funny that we as a LGBTQ+ community are told, ‘oh, there are gay people in every show and every movie’,” the 42-year-old Ambrossi says. “But at the same time, they want us to be niche. But we need more mainstream pieces of art that talk about our history and puts us in the centre of the story, with gay actors portraying gay characters, and trans people, lesbians, bisexuals. So we’re done with it. We’re done with being niche.”

La Bola Negra, which is inspired by an unfinished play by the celebrated Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, is set over three time periods: before, during and long after the Spanish Civil War. In 1932, a wealthy young man (Milo Quifes) is refused entry to an exclusive members’ club due to rumours of his homosexuality; in 1937, a trumpeter (musician and first-time actor Guitarricadelafuente) falls for a captured freedom fighter (Miguel Bernardeau); in 2017, a struggling writer (Carlos González) discovers his familial links to both stories. All three sagas intertwine across the movie, which bends genres as it goes.

La Bola Negra is a fabulous romance, occasionally a mystery, often a war movie. And it’s certainly not niche – this is glossy, maximalist entertainment that looks eye-wateringly expensive despite its relatively scant budget of €15m. It is, though, relentlessly sexy, the camera lingering on taut male behinds and flocks of soldiers parading naked on Spanish beaches. There are elaborately staged love scenes between characters, but also incredibly mundane Grindr hook-ups which take place in run-of-the-mill Athens apartments. “At the beginning, when Carlos González is having sex in the bed?” Ambrossi hoots. “I love his body! It’s so raw, so beautiful.” But lest we think La Bola Negra is all softcore eroticism, Ambrossi quickly clarifies that the movie is also “very naked in the soul”.

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“Just look at the emotions of these men,” he says. “You don’t get that so much in cinema – the tenderness between men, the friendship.” He points to the scenes in which Guitarricadelafuente’s character gently pads at Bernardeau’s bloody war wounds with a moistened towel. “Women take care of men like that, like in The English Patient. But we don’t have our English Patient.”

The success of the film – which won a shared Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival – has taken its makers by surprise. Sitting alongside one another in a London hotel suite, the pair recall promotion of their earlier work being far more lo-fi than today’s set-up, with publicists swarming down the corridors outside and a queue of journalists eager to speak to them. Thirteen years ago, the 35-year-old Calvo remembers, the pair staged a musical called La Llamada, and “we’d put up posters, sell merchandise online, do anything to sell tickets – it was as if we had to push it so hard just to justify the work somehow”. It’s different now, with Netflix picking the movie up in the US (Altitude is distributing it here) and helping finance an extensive, global promotional campaign. “The movie really speaks for itself,” Calvo continues. “It’s like, oh, it doesn’t matter if I’m nice, here’s the movie!”

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“We are nice, though,” Ambrossi grins. He sports manicured curls of hair and a boyish, pretty face. He looks a bit like Zac Efron if you were to draw him from memory. Calvo, meanwhile, is all abundant brows, tanned skin and razors for cheekbones – like a Bret Easton Ellis character who’s spent the summer in Madrid.

The stratospheric success of La Bola Negra has admittedly been aided by the intrigue surrounding its directors, whose romantic relationship of 13 years came to an end during filming. There was no drama, just a shared sense that the spark had faded between them. They pushed through the rest of production and then, last November, publicly announced they were separating – if not, they insisted, as creative partners.

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“What I’ve learnt from this experience is that we’re meant to be together beyond our relationship,” Ambrossi says. “There were times when I’d ask myself, are we meant to go our separate ways or do we do something else? And I discovered that this is our destiny – we’re meant to be doing this together as professionals.”

“We are so connected,” Calvo adds with a nod.

“We know what the other one is thinking,” Ambrossi says. “We can not speak for hours, or days even, and then once we come back together we’ll have the same answer to a problem with a scene.

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“It’s like twinning,” Calvo says. “As if we’re brothers.”

When it comes to work, they operate differently. “I have my OCD and he has his intuition,” Calvo says. “So we meet somewhere in the middle. Like I’d ask for 70 takes of every scene if I could, whereas he’d be like, ‘no, we’ve got the magic, relax’.”

Some days during filming, though, it was Penélope Cruz asking for more and more takes. She has a dazzling extended cameo in the film as a flamboyant cabaret singer tasked with entertaining the Spanish troops, and was “unstoppable”, Calvo recalls. “She was so nervous about singing and dancing and wanted to do it right. She was like, ‘one more take, gimme one more!’, but at some point we had to go home.” He laughs. “She was so committed to this tiny part, which is why she’s as good as she is.” (Cruz is widely predicted to receive an Oscar nomination for the movie.)

Both Ambrossi and Calvo admit to being late to discovering queer Spanish history. They credit much of their education to their time on Drag Race, which would see queens pull from cultural history for their weekly looks. In 2020 they created the limited series Veneno, too, which told the story of the Spanish trans icon Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez. “That show was such a wake up call,” Ambrossi says. “I knew about pop culture. I knew about cinema. But not the history of how we got to where we are today.” Afterwards, he began working with Fundación 26 de Diciembre, a non-profit organisation offering support to elderly LGBTQ+ people. “Suddenly, everything clicked in my mind – how privileged I am, how lucky I am.”

Calvo credits his queer education to movies and records, and discovering David Bowie as a teenager, then Pedro Almodóvar. “But I had to look for queerness,” he says. “It wasn’t offered to me. It was always very hidden.” He thinks it’s better today for young queer people, but admits to having reservations. “There’s more conversation and more openness, but I feel like there’s a big shadow heading upon them that I didn’t have as a kid.”

Ambrossi is more optimistic. “Growing up, I was taught that it was wrong to be gay,” he says. “Like really wrong. I look at young people today and believe it’s better now because they can be free and understand themselves better. So even though that shadow is bigger, the freedom is bigger, too.”

I suggest that I’ve learnt over the years that rights are perpetually unstable, rather than ever written in stone, but Ambrossi leans forward to correct me. “The rights of some,” he says. “Some people have their rights written in stone, but the other half of society is supposed to be up for debate. Let’s talk about trans rights – ‘can they use the bathroom?’ Oh, let’s debate that for fun.” He shakes his head. “It’s crazy.” Calvo suggests that the world’s politics only puts fire in their bellies creatively. “It is part of our job to create things that fight against intolerance and hate and fascism,” he says.

Neither Ambrossi nor Calvo know what they’ll work on next, but do know that they’ve cleared their schedules until March, which coincidentally times up with next year’s Academy Awards – a night which theoretically would serve as the grand finale to La Bola Negra’s extensive release and awards campaign.

“But we don’t know what the next few months will bring,” Ambrossi says.

I knock on the table between us to wish the pair luck, only to be met by gasps of horror.

“That’s not wood!” Calvo cries. He leaps up to a nearby chair, tapping it furiously.

“Let’s see what happens,” Ambrossi says, grinning. “But we want it.”

‘La Bola Negra’ is in UK and Ireland cinemas now, via Altitude