James Bond: Daniel Craig's leather gloves almost cost Skyfall 'millions upon millions'

Who would have thought that a single pair of leather gloves could almost cost a film studio millions of pounds? But that's exactly what could have happened, had it not been for the quick-thinking of an editor on Sam Mendes' hugely-successful James Bond outing, Skyfall.

Filmmaker and film critic Charlie Lyne took to Twitter to share the story which he learned from someone who worked on the movie. Lyne explained that Daniel Craig liked to go shopping in his downtime, and returned to set one day with a pair of leather gloves that he thought would "be the kind of thing Bond would wear", and urged his director to let him wear them in a scene.

Mendes replied 'yes', which subsequently led to Craig donning the gloves in the sequence set in a lavish Macanese casino, where Bond gets in a fight with a particularly formidable baddie and ends up in a pit with a Komodo dragon. The pair scuffle and the villain actually ends up with Bond's Walther PPK handgun, ready to fire it as his opponent. He seemingly hesitates however and the Komodo dragon ends up biting him.

Now, as lovers of Skyfall will know, prior to that scene, Ben Whishaw's Q equips Bond with the gun set specifically to only work if Bond's fingerprints are on the trigger. That ties in with why the baddie couldn't operate the gun in the pit, but how on Earth was Bond planning on firing it in the thick of the action if he was wearing leather gloves that obscured his prints?

Fortunately, some keen-eyed individuals finishing up the movie noticed this in the film's post-production, but it left Mendes and the studio weighing up their options as to how to rectify the problem. Lyne recounts how his insider said that they calculated just how much it would cost to get Craig, the other actor and everything together again to reshoot but realised it would be far too expensive – costing "millions and millions" – and instead opted to computer-generate Craig's skin into the scene.

"The only solution becomes to digitally paint in Bond's hands," Lyne said. "If you watch the scene now ... you can see that Bond has these ridiculously podgy hands, because in every single frame he was wearing these thick leather gloves that have now been painted over with Craig-tone hands."

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