I returned home late last night, curry-plump, to find a message from my mother on the answerphone. She sounded a bit anxious, and that made sense as her story unfolded. She’d been drinking coffee with a friend at a Nando’s, when police came in and ordered everyone outside. If I tell you that this happened in Exeter, you might understand why. Mum had chosen to have her coffee next door to the venue where a mentally unstable convert to Islam had done his best to blow the town centre up with a home made bomb. Oops.

This news happened on the same day that filmmaker Terence Davies lambasted fellow British creators for following American models of film and not being true to regional British experience. This as part of the launch campaign for his latest film, yet another elegaic exploration of the Liverpool of his childhood. Not to appear too crass, but I wonder exactly how much money this film will make? I have seen some of Davies’s work and found it sensitive and moving, but common sense tells you there is a limited audience for films that feature 90 second shots of the shadows of rain playing artfully on the living room rug.

So, if we’re to make films representative of the British experience, what are we to make of my mother’s story, which comes seemingly straight from an American thriller? It was even structured like a mainstream movie, with normality (coffee with a friend) shaken by an inciting incident a few minutes in (the police telling everyone to leave), before mum and everyone else were moved first to one point, then to another (two chunks of the second act) before returning home shocked but safe (third act).

Acts of terrorism have no respect for parochial aesthetics. And neither should filmmakers. We live in an interconnected world, where a web of influences play on one another in a fashion that no individual can comprehend. So instead, we simplify, and live within our own edited version of the world at large. In Terence’s case, it seems he’s still stuck in 1950s Liverpool.

Thankfully, other British filmmakers have found ways of capturing something to say about the world we live in now: Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things is a masterful examination of the effects of migration in Britain’s capital city. Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland explores modern family relationships against a complex metropolitan backdrop. Shane Meadows has brought the underside of the East Midlands to the screen on several occasions, from his shorts such as the wonderful Where’s The Money Ronnie to his last feature This Is England. So, let’s not pretend that contemporary British filmmakers aren’t interested in the country they’re from. Even films that have an effectively American model of storytelling, such as Paul Andrew Williams’s brilliant thriller London to Brighton, still bring a distinctly British turn to the proceedings.

Yes, there is another side to British filmmaking, present in the James Bond films, in anything featuring Hugh Grant, and in costumed dramas, but those films are an equally valid part of the country’s cinematic culture – and unlike Terence Davies’s oeuvre are likely to be the ones that make the money that enable producers to take risks on edgier propositions. Let’s not forget, Davies’s work owes its existence to the arts equivalent of another grand British institution – the welfare state. And long may that be the case…but please don’t suggest that your preferred style of filmmaking is the best in a world as complex, as fascinating, as rich in story, as we all inhabit in the 21st century.