There are some details that cement a film to a particular culture or worldview, even if there was every intent on the part of the filmmakers to create something for everyone. In the delightful Toy Story 3 it’s the fact that, in climbing up to a toilet seat, one of the characters first puts a piece of toilet paper onto it. There’s something very American about that, an exaggerated concern for health and hygiene that comes from a country where advertisers have succeeded in making the public paranoid about even the possibility of germs.

Often, it’s what goes into us rather than what comes out of us that makes for culturally revealing film scenes. Where would Italian American family gatherings be without lavish attention to the food prepared by mama? Meals are part of the fabric that binds families of all sorts together. There’s a warmth and pervasive reinforcement of social roles with Italian American eating in particular — Scorsese’s films are full of that kind of detail. It’s easier to get someone to do a hit when you’ve filled them with home made pasta and a fabulous ragu first.

Food is universal. Seeing how people eat and drink helps to understand even supposedly alien cultures. Tampopo is the glorious story of a Japanese widow who is aided in her quest to run a successful noodle bar by a truck driver and his friends. Food is part of sex play, and part of everyone’s routine — an old lady becomes the bane of a shopkeeper’s life by the simple act of squeezing his vegetables.

When a filmmaker wants to convey the otherness of a non-human species, food is a common first port of call. In Dark Crystal, looming gothic creatures impale small scurrying ones with surgically precise cutlery in a banquet scene. The prawn-like aliens in District 9 have a thing for cat food. And leave it to the Klingons to drink blood wine accompanied by a side of gagh: living worms.

Food is just one signifier that says a lot about a culture. The Market: A Tale Of Trade depicts what happens when a Turkish would-be wheeler dealer tries to get into the mobile phone market in the nineties as the first network reaches his area. There’s a great dichotomy depicted by two simple scenes: an old lady determined not to let phone engineers plant an ariel on her land, and the hero — unconvinced about phones at this point — being swayed by greed as he hears how young people in other parts of Turkey are going crazy for them.

A film about someone cheating on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? could have been made about Major Charles Ingram, and it could have been an interesting tale full of suppressed greed and very British stuff about class. Setting it in Mumbai was a stroke of genius, and Slumdog Millionaire became a much bigger success than a British equivalent could ever have been, for the way it opened up contemporary Indian society to a mainstream audience that had never seen and heard one of the world’s most exciting cities.

Through being able to capture visual nuances of every sort, from patterns on clothes to what’s growing in someone’s garden, facial expressions to the way a child puts her shoes on, film is uniquely capable of depicting how different people live, responding to each other and their environment. In difference there is richness, and from it we see through new eyes and learn more about the world we share.

All of the projects I am working on seek in part to depict worlds that will, to a greater or lesser degree, be new to the majority of viewers. In writing about homelessness, criminal behaviour, the experience of being psychotic, what London is like through the eyes of young people from somewhere else, I’m hoping that audiences will respond with the same fascination that I did when I discovered the differences that captivate me.