“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.
Javier Ambrossi, Guitarricadelafuente (as Sebastián), and Javier Calvo on the set of La Bola Negra.
Photo: Carla Oset/Netflix
