🎧 Meet Los Javis, the Directors Suddenly Taking Over Oscar Season

Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo — the filmmaking duo known simply as Los Javis — broke up romantically near the end of production on La Bola Negra, news big enough to make national headlines in Spain. But when I sat down with them last week onstage at the Toronto International Film Festival, one thing was immediately clear: The romantic relationship may be over, but the creative one is flourishing.

“We are very good at speaking with people and collaborating with people and having horizontal communication with every department all the time,” says Ambrossi. “We are not afraid of having doubts or not knowing. Maybe he thinks something, and I will think the opposite — I’m not scared of that.” On set with their collaborators, he continues, “We work together as a big team from the first moment — because we are, too.”

The timing is striking. Los Javis are entering Oscar season with the biggest film of their careers — one that has already won them Cannes’ best director prize and, on Sunday, TIFF’s coveted People’s Choice Award. La Bola Negra became the first non-English-language film to win the Toronto prize in 15 years and, notably, the first Netflix movie ever to take the festival’s top audience honor.

“We learned by ourselves to be directors. So we need space and love to create — and time,” adds Ambrossi, 42. “And that’s exactly what we give the actors.” 

But as we get into on today’s Prestige Junkie podcast — Los Javis are no newcomers. And their varied careers as playwrights, screenwriters, directors, actors and even reality TV judges all helped lead them to La Bola Negra, an ambitious, decades-spanning epic about queer identity in their native Spain. Though the first spark came when Calvo, 35, read the short play La piedra oscura, Ambrossi immediately knew they could make it part of a much larger story — even though neither of them had ever tackled a project nearly this big before. 

“The play is so small — it’s so fragile about the relationship between Sebastian and Rafael [characters played in the movie by Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau] — that I don’t know why I had that thought,” says Ambrossi, noting that the relationship in the original play, between soldiers on opposite sides of the Spanish Civil War, is strictly platonic. In Los Javis’ hands, it becomes an epic wartime romance. “Because the context of Sebastian and Rafael’s story is the war, I wanted to see the context of the relationship. But at the same time I was like, I don’t want to do a movie only about the Civil War characters. I was missing something.”

What was missing turned out to be two things: the four remaining pages of La bola negra, an unfinished play by Spanish literary great Federico García Lorca referenced near the end of La piedra oscura, and another part of the film’s three-part structure. The final piece, it turns out, was Los Javis themselves. 

“We suddenly knew that it was the story of our grandparents,” Ambrossi continues. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, it was 90 years ago that the people like us were killed in Spain.’ We needed to write a present storyline to talk about how we felt about that.”

“I think adapting is like when you read something and you tell it to your best friend, you get the things that touch you,” adds Calvo. ”The journey with this was a lot of talking, talking, talking. It was a really long conversation.”

Hear much, much more from Los Javis in today’s full podcast episode, which also includes a check-in from me and Christopher Rosen about Toronto’s big audience award winners, with La Bola Negra right on top.