Movies

Did Daniel Craig And Some Leather Gloves Cost 'Skyfall' Millions Of Dollars?

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By Ethan Anderton

It's hard for anyone except the producers and accountants of a blockbuster movie to know what the million-dollar budgets are spent on. Recently we learned roughly how much the crew of a hypothetical $200 million movie makes, but there are plenty more costs than the salaries of those working on the movie. In fact, the James Bond flick Skyfall is rumored to have had a surprising cost in post-production thanks to some leather gloves purchased by Daniel Craig.

Find out about the rumored problem created by some leather gloves in Skyfall after the jump.

Vulture called our attention to a couple Twitter posts from journalist and filmmaker Charlie Lyne who heard a story about how some leather gloves purchased by Daniel Craig to be used by James Bond in Skyfall resulted in some needed special effects and reshoots in order to fix a gaping hole in continuity and logic. Listen to the entire story recounted in two Twitter videos here:

Long story short, Daniel Craig wanted to wear some cool leather gloves during this casino scene. But then in the editing room, they realized that the moment where a henchman can't use James Bond's new gun, the one that will only shoot if his fingerprints are identified as holding it, wouldn't really work if James Bond also wouldn't have been able to use it while wearing these gloves. So instead of reshooting everything, they digitally replaced the gloved hands with bare digital hands.

However, Phil Noble Jr. at Birth.Death.Movies didn't entirely buy this scenrio. First of all, what kind of fashionable male, filmmaker and the costume designer on set, would approve a set of leather gloves being worn with a tuxedo? Daniel Craig is known for finding cool stuff on his own to wear in the James Bond movies, as the actor himself has discussed on the Nerdist podcast, but he's not daft when it comes to making those decisions.

There's a good chance that there's still some truth to this story though, and maybe some wires got crossed as to which scene in question needed to be rejiggered due to these gloves that Daniel Craig wanted to wear. In Skyfall, there's a scene in Shanghai where James Bond does in fact wear some nice leather gloves, and it's the only part in the movie in which he does so. It's also the only part where he uses his trusty new fingerprint gun. Therefore, it stands to reason, this is the scene where Daniel Craig and the filmmakers forgot about this little gadget detail. Here's the scene in question:

Before this sequence, there's a shot in a car where Bond must remove the glove to test the gun's fingerprint scanner, which could easily be a pick-up shot done after production was already finished. From then on, including the ride up the elevator, he doesn't have gloved hands. However, before he encounters the assassin who just killed someone in the building across the street, he puts his gun away, only to be seen with the gloves back on his hands for the remainder of the action.

If you need anymore convincing that some editing and fixes were made to get rid of the gloves for a bit, here's the best piece of evidence in support of that:

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That's one of the first images used to promote the movie. There's James Bond, with a leather glove on, in the scene where he's supposed to be using his fingerprint gun, wearing a glove while holding it. Now, there's no guarantee that millions were spent to fix this mistake. After all, some of the shots with Craig's ungloved hands don't look like they're digital, which can be easy to spot even with some of the best visual effects. But maybe some more pick-ups or straight-up reshoots were done for certain shots to fix the problem. After all, if you look at Craig in this picture, he's certainly has more of a five o'clock shadow in the gloved picture than the shot from the movie at the top of the article.

This may seem like a strange thing to nitpick and examine, but it's not the first time a James Bond movie with Daniel Craig did some crafty things in post-production to change up a scene a bit. Thanks to the detective work at Birth.Death.Movies for clearing this one up.

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