It was swimming that brought the stage designer Dan Potra to Australia from his native Romania. Not literally, of course – that would be a long old paddle. Rather, the image of a particular swimmer, the triple Olympic gold medallist Shane Gould.

For Potra, growing up in 1970s Transylvania, the teenage wunderkind and her clutch of medals from the Munich Games represented the Australian dream. A dream that still played on his mind as a 1980s arts student in Bucharest. Between Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist regime and the fallout of the Chernobyl disaster, moving to the other side of the world didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

“Europe felt very doomed at the time, a bit like Einstein on the Beach,” recalls Potra, referencing the seminal Philip Glass opera of the period. “And Australia seemed like the last place that would ever be touched by those things.”

So Potra upped sticks at the age of 23, enrolling at the National Institute of Dramatic Art on his arrival in Sydney. It is the city where he still lives, where he married and where, in 2000, he designed part of the opening ceremony of Sydney’s own Games.

It’s one credit on a CV chock-a-block with international theatre, music and film productions. And Potra’s latest project, appropriately enough, is another Glass opera, The Perfect American. Directed by Phelim McDermott (who also worked on Glass’s Satyagraha), this fictional account of Walt Disney’s last days premiered at the Teatro Royal in Madrid, before English National Opera’s run and, now, its first Australian production at the 2014 Brisbane festival.

“The space here is totally different from Madrid and London,” says Potra from the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s concert hall on a break from rehearsals. “The show feels different too. We had 12 entrances in the previous venues. Here we only have two, so we have to be very imaginative about how we get people on and off stage.”

And imagination is the theme under investigation in the show, too, which asks: was Disney a creative genius or just a canny chief executive? If that seems an odd subject for an avant-garde trio like Glass, McDermott and Potra, then think again.

“The commercial side of Disney is something to rail against,” says Potra. “On the other hand, when you are growing up behind the iron curtain, there’s something magical about his western way of making movies. You’re drawn in by the level of ambition and innovation. By the mechanics and the magic. By Donald Duck!”

What does Potra, with his design credentials, really make of Disney though? “He created this whole parallel universe with just some paper and pen. A world that comes to life on screen but can only last so long before you have to roll back to reality,” he says. A tragedy that Potra’s designs for A Perfect Amercian – a whirl of cogs, caricatures and cranes – bring to painful life.

It was McDermott who suggested him for the project. “Once Phelim brought up my name, Philip wanted to know who I was and what I was doing.” They all met for lunch, and Potra was petrified. “As you can imagine. Because this was Philip Glass. I was in the presence of a musical god.”

But he needn’t have worried. The composer gave him his blessing – and a small fragment of the score to work from (which Potra likens to a charcoal sketch of a painting). Glass then told both director and designer that The Perfect American was going to be “much more romantic” than his previous work. “We couldn’t conceive of what he might mean by that. So we listened to every piece of Philip Glass music we could get our hands on to understand that musicality.”

The full score wasn’t delivered until two weeks before Madrid. “He kept saying, ‘Give me your storyboard and I’ll write the music to underscore it.’ This, from the most famous composer in the world!” Potra pauses, fanboy again. “Just to be involved in a new Philip Glass production, well, I’m very chuffed.”

What a British word to use. But it turns out that Potra and his young family lived in London for five years. “Like a lot of people in the arts in Australia, we felt the need to broaden our horizons,” he says. “It was all part of our adventure.” So what brought them back? “We could see our daughters becoming little English girls. My wife said to me, ‘We’ve got to bring them home.’ ”

With some pride, Potra reports that he is now raising two Shane Goulds of his own, swimmers both. And straight talkers. “One thing I admire about Australia is people’s directness,” he says of his adoptive country. “It means you know where you stand if you’ve done something stupid.

“As a designer, I don’t have time for lots of games – and believe me, this industry is full of them. I prefer someone who says, ‘Mate, it just doesn’t work.’ Without that, I will always be pushing things as far as they could go.”

At this year’s Brisbane festival, the only person Potra is pushing hard is himself. On top of The Perfect American, he has also designed another Australian premiere, La Boite’s reworking of A Doll’s House, as well as Theatre Republic, the festival’s hub for more experimental shows. “Festivals bring out the explorer in each one of us,” he says excitedly of his multiple involvement. “I love the buzz they create.”

But the arts are not the only place to find new meaning. “I’ve recently done a trip to central Australia, all the way to Uluru,” he says. “I couldn’t believe I’d been living here for so many years and hadn’t been further. I might as well have been to the moon, I came back so inspired and full of ideas.”

“For Europeans, Australia is like a wet fish. You don’t know where to grab it from. The only thing you can do is slice it right in half so that you can begin to understand what it really is.”

• The Perfect American runs from 15-20 September at QPAC. Guardian Australia will be covering Brisbane Festival live from 6 September