In the down-at-heel cafe at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, Hannah McGill cuts an effortlessly alluring figure. Given her successful three years as artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, it seems superficial to emphasise her glamour. But there is no getting away from it. She has Béatrice Dalle’s full-featured sultriness, Bette Davis’s vermilion lips and Jean Muir’s pale, waifish aesthetic.

When she took over as artistic director at the age of 29, nobody was quite sure what she would bring to the role. Known for insightful, quirky writing — she was a journalist with The Sunday Times and a film critic before landing the job — McGill was an independent spirit. So far she has won plaudits for her festival programmes, the latest of which has just been unveiled. But it is her understanding and appreciation of old-fashioned movie glamour that has swept through the festival like a whiff of cologne in a cellar.

Last year McGill put Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller on the red carpet. This year Maggie Gyllenhaal, Sam Mendes and his wife Kate Winslet are expected to attend the opening-night premiere of Mendes’s film Away We Go.

“It’s lovely to have the beautiful people,” she says. “It’s exciting and it shows the trajectory from small film maker to Oscar-winning star. My priority is promoting the smaller films and the less well known people but, in order for that to happen, you need the audience to have that thrill of being close to celebrity.”

But there is glamour and “glamour”.

The festival’s hot ticket this year is the UK premiere of The Girlfriend Experience, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Sasha Grey. Should Grey decide to enliven Edinburgh with her presence next month, however, she might be more than the Morningside matrons can handle. Grey, 21, is one of America’s top porn stars.

“Good,” says McGill when I tell her I am unfamiliar with Grey’s work. “I Googled her and I will never be the same again. It’s a challenge to put a woman like that into a serious drama but she’s actually very good. She’s fascinating because she is so young but she has been well known in the adult entertainment industry since she was 18 and for some very extreme content. She is self-possessed, articulate and educated, so she tackles assumptions about women in her position.”

Grey is the first porn actress to play the lead in a serious drama by an Oscar-winning director. Considering how mainstream pornography has become in recent years via the internet and cable television, it’s surprising it has taken so long for the crossover to happen.

“There has been an enormous shift in my lifetime,” says McGill. “When I was at school, there was this incredible mystique, not just about porn, but about what bodies looked like and what people did. Now it’s all just a click away and I don’t know what effect that will have on people long term. It’s a challenge for cinema because cinema thrives on mystique.”

McGill does not believe the casting of Grey will open the floodgates for porn stars to appear in mainstream films. If anything, she thinks Hollywood has become more prudish in the past decade.

“A few years ago I thought the genres would meld much more, but America is dominated by a very conservative mentality,” she says. “Hillary Clinton can’t show cleavage without there being an outcry. Hollywood sets the agenda and there is such moral stringency there now. At one time it looked as if Hollywood stars would make much more explicit films but that hasn’t happened either.”

A film such as Basic Instinct, in which a knickerless Sharon Stone infamously uncrossed her legs on screen, would not be made with an A-list star these days, she says. The era of the erotic thriller is over.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010