His chosen terrain was the firm ground of real and recognisable places, especially the County Derry landscape of his childhood.
He works from an excellent screenplay by up-and-coming British dramatist Matt Charman, a script punched up in recognisable places by Joel and Ethan Coen.
Instead of a world drenched in blood and ridden with crime, we were presented with recognisable places filled with people doing everyday things: getting up, chatting to their family, commuting to jobs that frustrated or fulfilled them, falling in love.
Sydney is one of the most recognisable places on Earth, thanks to its famous city beaches and the two contrasting works of genius on the harbour, the magnificently functional bridge and the maddeningly dysfunctional opera house.
It's powerful all right: his "Jihadi John" is recognisable, but placed in a kind of shadowy, sinister miasma.
It began a long tradition, that great laughs can come from placing recognisable archetypes alongside the Great British anxieties: social humiliation and reputational damage.
You're whisked away from reality into a semi-recognisable dreamscape, a place where the liminality has quietly, subtly, taken control.
The album cover for 1, 000 Forms of Fear is simply a bright blonde wig on a black background, a kind of instantly recognisable disguise which, in place of her face, has become her identifying feature.
The work of film-maker Asghar Farhadi shows us a Tehran which is much more like a European city than cinema-goers here had suspected, a place with recognisable people whose stressed working lives are not governed just by geopolitical issues that make it onto the news.
There is a half-recognisable democratic mechanism in place.
