While it is rare for a director to have such a detailed hand in the design of his film's sets, Kosinski is clear he still needed his film's production design team to make those initial designs a reality. "I don't try to poke my nose into everything, but I respect the process," he says. "It's important to a director to make sure the design is going to allow me to tell the story I want to tell, so I make sure that the set's going to work for all the scenes and it's going to allow me to block out the action and put the camera wherever I want. My production designer, Darren Gilford, I worked with him on Tron, and he's used to me sitting down and marking up blueprints and changing dimensions when we need to, but always for good reason."

Kosinski does hope, however, that he knows where to draw the line. "If a director's worried about the panel gaps or the light spacing on a bridge on the set," he says with a chuckle, "he's probably not doing his job in terms of keeping a balanced approach to the film as a whole."

The set designs in both Oblivion and TRON: Legacy were both driven in part by the respective film's larger stories and their need for a certain aesthetic unity. But there is no escaping their Kosinski-ness, either. "I just loved the architecture of architects like Mies van der Rohe," says the director, "whose famous saying was 'Less is more.' He also said, 'God is in the details.' I think those are two things that stick with me in my approach to design."