Mis-En-Scene Inception

The job as a director is to oversee the whole production of the movie, and make sure that deadlines and budgets are being kept, as well as organizing the film crew to meet his expectations.
Christopher Nolan is the director of Inception, and he has been working on this for 10 years. His baseline was that have dreams projected in movies, and that dreams can feel real when we are in them, and that we are invested in the dream we are in. The hallway scene was filmed in a huge custom rig, because Nolan wanted to do as many as the stunts as he possibly could without using CGI. He wanted to shots to be genuine, and later use technology to enhance the scenes instead. 

Nolan had incredible trust in his team and his actors/actresses, which is what made the film possible. he would work closely with the actors in order to get the right "personalities" on screen. 
Nolan did try to navigate the hallway while moving, in order to see what he was putting his actors through, but he could not because of motion sickness.