Edoardo Ponti: director descendant

Elegance is very dangerous,' says Edoardo Ponti knowingly. 'It's like TNT. A little goes a long way.' He learned this not from his mother, Sophia Loren, but from his maternal grandmother, the classical musician Romilda Villani, who died when he was 17. 'A very strong woman. I never saw her wear jeans or a nightgown, only high heels, a skirt and a very appropriate blouse. She walked confidently, like she came from everything, when in fact she came from nothing.'

The life-changing effect of glamour is the subject of the short film Edoardo Ponti has just directed, starring Helena Christensen and David Gandy. He draws remarkably strong performances from both. You'd barely know they are models rather than actors; next to Tom Hollander (who has a hilarious cameo), they more than hold their own. When I congratulate Ponti, he shrugs suavely: 'That's what I do.' With the double impact of his mother and his father, the film producer Carlo Ponti (who died in 2007, aged 94), Edoardo feels he was born to make films. His elder brother Carlo Jr has been associate conductor of the Russian National Orchestra since 2000, but for Edoardo the choice was always clear. At 37, he has made two features – one, Between Strangers, starring his mother. 'I think part of it is genetic,' he says. 'Genes can be frighteningly powerful.' He sees family traits even in Lucia Sofia, the four-year-old daughter he has with his wife, the US TV actress (and former professional ice skater) Sasha Alexander. Sitting in the bar of the W Hollywood hotel in Los Angeles, a glass of white wine in hand, Ponti is wearing Converse trainers with no laces (no hip young Angelenos wear laces in their trainers any more) and the Cartier watch his father gave him for his 21st birthday. He radiates that compelling Italian quality – relaxed superiority.

In his latest short film he has cheekily subverted the classic Blow-Up, the film that came to represent 1960s London. Helena Christensen plays the David Hemmings role, a photographer snapping away with moody lust at David Gandy, who takes Vanessa Redgrave's part. Edoardo doesn't think Antonioni would mind this fond pastiche of his masterpiece. 'I knew Antonioni well, particularly in the last year of his life, after his stroke, when I worked as his assistant helping him navigate LA for a film project that didn't get made. I took it as one of those lovely subtle signs when Helena told me on the first day of shooting that it was the anniversary of Antonioni's death.' Moreover, Edoardo's father produced Blow-Up. 'When Antonioni approached my father to do Blow-Up, it was going to be set in Rome,' says Edoardo. 'But it became a postcard from London. My father had a feeling for the zeitgeist. Also he was an Anglophile. I am, too. I love the streets, particularly the mews. I love a mews.'

Ponti also tapped into David Bailey's gene pool by hiring his son Fenton, 22, for a cameo as a photographer's assistant. 'He was very quiet and a good listener. It was a godsend having the spirit of Bailey there.'

Like his father, who talked 104 films into existence, including Fellini's La Strada and David Lean's Doctor Zhivago, as well as masterminding his wife's career, Ponti is a great talker: 'The trick to casting is for the soul of the actor to match the soul of the character Then they can do no wrong because their very DNA fits.' When he is on set, however, he says very little. 'Actors don't need a lot of talk beyond the first few sentences. They may say they don't draw on their own life, but all actors do.' Ponti is one of those directors who loves actors and has close friendships with stars such as Malcolm McDowell, who appeared in Between Strangers. 'The first time I called "action", his eyes changed colour. They went from blue to electric.'

Ponti understands actors because of his mother. They are very close; he was the longed-for second son, born when Loren was 39. 'She had already had two miscarriages prior to having us,' explains Ponti. 'We always felt like being a mother had always been her deepest desire. Never did my brother or I feel we came second to her career.' How did she pull that off? 'No matter whether she was with us or not, she created an atmosphere that she was with us, whether through notes, or the right phone call. When we were together she was always fully present. Never half-there. We laughed a lot, we played in the pool, we watched comedies starring Louis de Funès. She was never glamorous. She was my mum.'

She was also a screen icon. 'She never took any of that seriously. She took – and takes – her work very seriously, of course, but she always took the fame with a massive grain of salt. I see other celebrities who do take it seriously and it makes me sad because when that goes they'll have nothing left. And it does go. Perspective and the right upbringing have to teach you that all fame is bullshit.'

His mother had succeeded in the face of hardship. 'My mother never had a relationship with Riccardo, her father – he gave her his name (Scicolone; Loren is a stage name) but he was never around. My grandmother was still in love with this man, so she and my mother left Naples and went together to Rome to find him.' The mission didn't work, and ended only with Romilda falling pregnant a second time to the feckless construction engineer, but the young Sophia was drawn to Rome's film industry. 'My mother was 14 but was already very beautiful and she wanted to try her hand at film. They went to a few castings but it didn't work out and after a few weeks they ran out of money. It was really a leap of faith that they stayed on. My grandmother made a lot of sacrifices.' The lack of a father hurt the family deeply; Edoardo never met Riccardo.

By the time Edoardo was born, however, both his parents were 'very well established'. When I ask which of the two was a stronger character, he thinks for a moment. 'My father's strength was to see in a person what they could be and my mother's was to live up to that vision.'

Edoardo went to Aiglon College 'a British boarding school in Switzerland' (where he was friends with Sheherazade Goldsmith, then known as 'Shubee'). The family lived between LA and Geneva because his parents had renounced their Italian citizenship. Ponti was already married when he met Sophia and in order to obtain a divorce from his first wife (which was then illegal in Italy) and marry again in 1957, all three parties had been forced to become French. Was that a tough situation for the family to be in? Ponti laughs it off. 'What would you do in order to marry Sophia Loren? I think anyone would become French to marry Sophia Loren. Love was more important than nationality. The cultural heritage of that country and my parents is so interlaced that it really doesn't matter that a piece of paper tells them they're French. My parents could not be more Italian.'