It's the family business

When your surname is Scott and your father is called Ridley, it's difficult to resist becoming a film-maker

Imagine the pressure on a fledgling film director whose dad made Alien and Gladiator, whose uncle made Top Gun and whose two brothers have both been directing for 10 years. This is the life of Jordan Scott - the latest scion of the Scott dynasty, which comprises father Ridley, uncle Tony and brothers Jake and Luke, and which has been a dominant force in the industry for nearly 40 years.

"I was always interested in directing, but in that teenage way I was determined that I would go and explore every other avenue and I wasn't going to be a director," says Jordan Scott. Now, the teenage rebellion is behind her and, at 27, she is already making a name for herself in the worlds of advertising, music videos and short film. Television audiences are probably unwittingly familiar with her work - the latest Renault Clio commercial, and the Orange advert starring Zinedine Zidane. Her latest is a short with her father and the fashion designer Miuccia Prada. The three-minute film, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, is on TV throughout December to promote the new Prada fragrance.

For the Scott family, the link between advertising and film has always been strong. Her father didn't direct a film until he was 40. He set up Ridley Scott Associates in 1968 with his brother and has directed more than 2,000 commercials.

Scott has entitled the piece Thunder Perfect Mind, after the ancient poem which is read throughout by the model Daria Werbowy: "I am the first and the last/I am the wife and the virgin/I am the mother and the daughter."

The prospect of her first collaboration with her father was more daunting than working for the famously exacting Italian fashionista, Mrs P: "In the beginning, I was like: 'How are we not going to kill each other?' At the end of the day, who would turn down an opportunity to work with someone as amazing as him? I know what he does and we've had a million conversations about it, but I realised that I'd never gotten to see what he does, one on one, every day." Scott Senior deferred to his daughter as "the boss" of the project but still imparted the odd pearl of fatherly wisdom.

Jordan Scott has recently completed All the Invisible Children - a film made up of seven segments, each one by a different director. Scott's section, Jonathan, stars Kelly MacDonald and David Thewliss, who plays a traumatised war photographer. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is due for release here next year.

Her father claims that "she could do a [full-length] film easily." She left her native London behind to study fine art at the Art Centre College of Design, in Pasadena. Having realised that she was "never going to be a painter", she gave into genealogy and turned to directing.

She was exposed to the film world at an early age, playing "Dutch schoolgirl" in White Squall in 1996, and a stuntwoman in Legend, aged seven, alongside Tom Cruise. "They needed a miniature stunt double to make the sets look bigger. My dad thought it would be a bloody good idea for me to do it."

'Thunder Perfect Mind' is showing now