Australian director George Miller has said having Mel Gibson star in the fourth Mad Max movie would be like “seeing Sean Connery appear in a Daniel Craig Bond film”.

Miller was speaking about his new blockbuster, Mad Max: Fury Road, at a Los Angeles press conference.

Gibson starred in the first three films as the character of Max Rockatansky, aka Mad Max.

Miller said: “The rumour went around that Mel might do a cameo but we were trying really hard to make this world authentic and for the audience to be caught up in the experience of the screen and it didn’t make sense to suddenly have Mel appear, it would just pull the audience out.

“I don’t think he would’ve done it anyway. It would be like seeing Sean Connery appear in a Daniel Craig Bond film.”

He also explained how the time was right for a ‘new’ Max, played by Tom Hardy.

He said: “This movie took so long to get going that by the time the planets finally all aligned, Mel [Gibson] had hit a lot of turbulence in his life and it was also never meant to be a story about an older warrior. It’s not like the movie Unforgiven or something like that.

It was time for there to be a new Mad Max , just like there have been several James Bonds

“And so it was time for there to be a new Mad Max, just like there have been several James Bonds over the period. And when Tom walked into the room he felt so much like the character to me.”

Miller also said initially he’d not wanted to do a fourth movie, but eventually changed his mind, stating: “It’s been on my mind since the last millennium, 1999, when the idea first came.

“I’d already made three Mad Max movies, so I didn’t really want to do another one, I had other things I wanted to do, but the idea came, I kept on pushing it away, it came back and grew and grew and I found myself saying, ‘I think we’ll be making another Mad Max movie’.

“I just didn’t realise it would take more than 12 years to be here today with the finished movie!”