George Miller, the director of the Mad Max series, including the upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road, claims that he was “heartbroken” over original Mad Max actor Mel Gibson’s long string of recent controversies, but insists that the real reason that he did not cast the actor was simply because Gibson was too old.

As the Sydney Morning Herald notes, Miller helped bring Gibson to the big screen and to international fame and stardom when the first film premiered over three decades ago.

Miller notes that he was very interested in bringing Gibson back as post-apocalyptic biker Max Rockatansky for the fourth film. Unfortunately, Miller has planned to release a whole new trilogy of Mad Max films rather than just one new film, and was concerned that Gibson could not commit, or could not last through, three more movies. In addition, as 77Square notes, there was a series of delays led to Miller having to recast the part, with Tom Hardy taking over the role for the new trilogy.

"I have a great affection for Mel. I was really heartbroken to see him go into (the scandals)," Miller said. "But it's a new time. I hope Mel gets to act in more movies because I think he's a wonderful actor. But I think he's an amazingly good director."

As we have noted in the past, Miller has described Fury Road as an extended chase scene with minimal dialogue. The Sydney Morning Herald also noted that the screenplay consisted mainly of storyboards rather than a conventional script structure.

"You're picking up the characters and the backstory as you go," Miller explained. "And in order to create that backstory, we found ourselves having written two other screenplays. One of them is completed. The other one is in the form of a kind of unedited novel. So by the time we got there, we realised we've got a couple more Mad Max stories to tell, and that...required us to cast someone who was younger."

Miller showed footage from Fury Road to an enthusiastic audience at San Diego Comic Con. The film will be Miller’s first live action film since his work on the two Happy Feet films.

We recently covered the release of the first trailer for Fury Road, which you can find here.

Credit: INFevents.com