Standing on the Manhattan set of his latest film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Oliver Stone was surrounded by a fictitious who's who of banking. His actors were sitting at a wooden conference table in a dark-panelled room intended to resemble the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The scene was an interpretation of the late-night negotiations that took place on 14 March 2008, as Bear Stearns teetered on the brink of collapse.

Frank Langella was in character as Louis Zabel, the head of proprietary trading firm Keller Zabel Investments. In plot time, it was about 1:30am on the worst night of Zabel's life. His firm's stock had plummeted amid rumours of its multibillion-dollar debt; Zabel was trying to persuade the surrounding bank presidents and government officials to bail him out, but there were few takers. Then Stone yelled out: "Where's the china?"

According to Vincent Farrell, a veteran Wall Street investor and one of Stone's consultants on the film, the men assembled that night would have eaten steaks from the Palm restaurant, just like JP Morgan Chase (JPM) executives had at a similar meeting.

Hours after eating, the remains would have been stacked up in the background. However, Farrell noted, the New York Fed doesn't have paper plates or Styrofoam. It uses fine china. That was the problem – there wasn't any. Stone was miffed. "So they went out and bought it," Farrell recalls.

The china didn't end up being visible in the film, but that it could have been underscores Stone's obsession with nailing even the minutest details of the financial industry. For the sequel to his 1987 film Wall Street, he recruited dozens of consultants to help. "We went to all levels, anyone who would speak to us," Stone says. "We must have talked to 25 or 35" Wall Street experts.

The final product, which opened earlier this month, centres on the wreckage of 2008.

The director also spoke to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who led investigations into investment bank Goldman Sachs (GS) and insurer American International Group (AIG), and economist-superstar Nouriel Roubini. Stone even picked the brain of Donald Trump – because "the way he thinks and talks, the optimism, the implied arrogance – all these things come into play".

Stone's "attention to detail and getting it right was astonishing", says Farrell, who served as the on-set fact-checker. The 63-year-old had originally been cast for a cameo as a talking head on CNBC – a role he regularly fulfills in real life as the chief investment officer of New York-based Soleil Securities. Stone was so impressed with Farrell's insights that he offered him a job as the film's technical adviser, which Farrell accepted. He offered his services for free, but the director insisted on paying what Farrell describes as a "generous" sum.

During filming, Farrell says, the actors were becoming too animated in rehear­sals. Farrell made the point to Stone, who told them to tone it down.

"Imagine I'm a trader on the line," Farrell explains. "I might be screaming into the phone, but I'm not gonna be gesturing wildly like you would on the floor." Likewise, during Keller Zabel's meeting at the Fed, Farrell said the actors looked too unkempt.

"These guys wouldn't be sitting there with their jackets off. And they would absolutely not be sitting there with a bunch of papers in front of them," Farrell says. "The Secretary of the Treasury wouldn't have a whole bunch of papers at a meeting like this." Stone took his word for it: the table was cleared and the jackets went back on.

Alex Cohen, a former Securities and Exchange Commission attorney, was present for the 2008 Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers emergency bailout meetings that inform two scenes in Money Never Sleeps. He and fellow former SEC counsel Brian Cartwright worked closely with Stone to make both as accurate as possible. "Did they drink out of paper cups? How many people were sitting at the table?" asks Cohen. As to the larger issues that affected the actors' performances: "How heated did the conversations get? How tense was the environment?"

At one point during the scene, Stone stopped filming and asked Cohen and Cartwright to explain to his actors the magnitude of the moment they were recreating. "It drove home to me how skilled these actors are," says Cohen. "This was not their world, but when you see them on the screen, you can really feel the emotion of what was going on."

Anthony Scaramucci, author of the financial advice treatise Goodbye Gordon Gekko, received the film's script in July 2009, read it, "took copious notes", and suggested a number of ideas to Stone. In particular, he helped refine the mentor-protégé relationship between Josh Brolin and Shia LaBeouf's characters. "On Wall Street," Scaramucci says, "the older man often tries to crush the younger. This helped Josh create the necessary tension."

Scaramucci also spent hours explaining the complicated motivation of Bretton James to Brolin. "What I said to Josh was, you're the CEO of [fictitious firm] Churchill Schwartz, let's say it's the Goldman composite. You should be on top of the world, yet you have a feeling of hollowness, because there's a guy out there called Joe Hedge Fund Manager who's making $500m a year and you're only making $70m. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna do something dramatically stupid."

Although Stone has no plans for a third Wall Street film, Scaramucci and his ilk may not have to return to their day jobs just yet. The film rights to Michael Lewis' latest best-seller, The Big Short, have been sold to Brad Pitt. Andrew Ross Sorkin's blockbuster, Too Big To Fail, has been optioned by HBO – as has All the Devils Are Here, by Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean, which won't even be published until November. Stone's consultants insist his movie's veracity will be hard to top. "There's nothing in this film that's bulls**t," says Farrell.

Bloomberg