When your father is Ridley Scott, entering into the family business is not easy. Just emerging from the shadow of the director of Gladiator and Blade Runner is hard enough, let alone dealing with accusations of nepotism. Not that Jake Scott seems to care. “I've had 40 years of it,” he says, relaxing in his LA office. “It's really water off a duck's back.” His younger half-sister, Jordan, concurs. “People can think whatever they want to think,” she says, with enough arrogance to remind me whose daughter she is.

After years directing music promos and commercials, both Jake and Jordan are now in pre-production, on Welcome to the Rileys and Cracks respectively, both due to shoot in April. These are the first two features to be produced under a new venture between Scott Free, the film and television arm of their father's company RSA, Future Films and HandMade Films. Yet the projects couldn't be more different from their father's epics.

“I don't think Welcome to the Rileys is a film my dad would ever want to make,” Jake says wryly of his film, set in New Orleans, with James Gandolfini as its lead. “I just don't think it's a world that would interest him.” It certainly interests Jake, though. He has four children with his producer-wife, Rhea, and was immediately drawn to this story of a couple torn apart after the death of their child.

Jordan's film, Cracks, meanwhile, recalls the contained nature of her father's 1977 debut The Duellists. It is a tale of “misguided love and obsession” set in an English all-girls boarding school in the 1930s. Eva Green, star of Casino Royale, will play Miss G, a charismatic teacher. “It reminded me a lot of Lord of the Flies,” says Jordan, who co-directed the short Jonathan with her father for the 2005 anthology movie All the Invisible Children. “It was interesting as you always see that kind of story played out among boys. You never see it presented with a group of girls.”

Jake and Jordan couldn't be more different. With pale skin and bright red shoulder-length hair, Jordan is a bundle of nervous energy, speaking in a plummy English accent far removed from her father's gruff Geordie brogue and the LA drawl. Meanwhile, Jake, 13 years older than Jordan, and now 42, is far more world-weary. But then, while Cracks is Jordan's feature debut, Welcome to the Rileys is Jake's second film. His first, Plunkett & Macleane (1999), about highwaymen, was a flop.

His father had advised him against taking on an ambitious period piece for his debut. “I may have been misguided in myself and I think a little bit uncertain about what the film was about,” he says now. The experience forced him to take an extended break from the business. “My family really helped me to see more clearly what it was that I wanted to be as a film-maker.”

Certainly, family comes up a lot when talking to the Scott siblings, whose uncle, Tony Scott (Top Gun), is also a highly successful director. Jake affectionately calls his father “bull-headed and stubborn” but is keen to show that they get on well. Jake, whose younger brother Luke is also a director, was the product of Ridley's 11-year marriage to the journalist Felicity Heywood. When his father remarried in 1979, to Jordan's mother, the producer Sandy Watson, the whole Scott clan lived in Wimbledon.

“I will be forever grateful to my dad for not moving us to LA,” Jordan says, adding that growing up in London saved her from becoming just another Hollywood movie brat. Eventually she went to LA to pursue a degree in fine arts before joining RSA, where she made commercials.

Jake had the advantage of being a teenager when his father was making his seminal films Alien and Blade Runner. On set for the former, he worked in the editing room during the school holidays on the latter. He began to direct ads and music videos, notably Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees and R.E.M's Everybody Hurts.

Ridley Scott is an executive producer on his children's films, and both are likely to tap “a great resource”, as Jake calls him, for advice during post-production. Nevertheless, neither has any intention of aping their father's legendarily ball-busting on-set style. “As my dad says, you just have to be you,” Jordan shrugs. “Just don't try and be something you're not.”

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