"Somebody wins, somebody loses"
The shoot kicked off in September in Manhattan, with Stone determined - as in Wall Street - to utilise real locations where possible.
To highlight the differences with the first movie, with its frequent footage of frenzied trading on the Stock Exchange, here several key scenes were filmed in the Federal Reserve Building.
Stone told the New York Times: “In the original ’87 movie there was no Federal Reserve, we didn’t get into that. But now the world has changed radically. This is part of the bulwark of the system.”
However, further versimilitude was injected into proceedings when on-screen couple LaBeouf and Mulligan started dating for real. As Stone wryly remarked to the NY Post, "I seem to be a good casting director."
Quizzed by OK! about her newfound pap-snap celeb status, Mulligan remarked of LaBeouf, "[He] understands how you can fall in love with the cast and the cast becomes your family.
"It's hard for people who aren't actors to understand how reliant you become on the people around you and how much you can get swept away by a character. You don't mean to but you just do and you are completely consumed by it, but it's lovely."
Aww. However, while everything was sweetness and light for the young stars, stormclouds were looming in Douglas' life.
On 28th July 2009, his son Cameron was arrested by the DEA for possession of half a pound of methamphetamine, enough to get him charged with intent to distribute - an imprisonable offence.
The shoot progressed against this backdrop and LaBeouf, for one, noticed the toll it was taking on his co-star. "Michael Douglas was an open wound on the set," he told GQ somewhat indiscreetly. "That dude is in pain. He was emotional putty on the set. A struggling man. We filmed a struggling man."
Douglas himself was more circumspect in interviews, no doubt aware that this was a case of life imitiating art - specifically, his role in Traffic as father to a drug addict.
He told Vanity Fair earlier this year, "Anybody who has a relative or child in substance abuse has some idea of what this feels like. This is one of those worst-case scenarios.
“It will ultimately be a painful lesson and very expensive as far as time is concerned. I don’t wish it on anybody, but then, you know, look, everybody’s got difficult things in life.”
So it proved. Things got worse for Cameron after he was caught in posssession of heroin while on house arrest, smuggled to him by his girlfriend inside an electric toothbrush.
On 20th April, after pleading guilty to all charges, Cameron Douglas was sentenced to five years in prison.
By then, the release of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps had itself been put on hold.
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