Last Tuesday afternoon, a black Cadillac Escalade arrived at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Lower Manhattan, built in the 1920s to resemble the Renaissance-era palaces of Florence, Italy. From a rear seat stepped a man in a cashmere sweater and dark slacks. “This is where the money is,” he said, borrowing the words of Willie Sutton, the Depression-era bank robber. “There is more gold here than anywhere in the world.” Look out, Wall Street: Oliver Stone is back.

This is familiar terrain for Stone: his father was a broker, and his 1987 film, Wall Street, became emblematic of an era of excess the filmmaker thought was fading, but in fact was only beginning. Now he is here to make a sequel, to capture greed on celluloid all over again, set against the backdrop of the financial collapse that began with the fall of Bear Stearns. In a meandering walk through the crooked streets of Manhattan’s financial district — it was a week before shooting of the sequel, titled Wall Street 2, was scheduled to begin — Stone said he never expected high finance to serve again as a tableau for his storytelling. “I thought it was a bubble that was over,” Stone said of the 1980s. “I thought those days were going to come to an end. The excess.”

Despite his own years of hard living Stone looked refreshed . His original film was a morality tale about greed and unvarnished ambition, and Stone’s own views on the excesses of capitalism were obvious. But the film and its famous lines — “Greed is good,” “Money never sleeps” — have had a cultural endurance that he never expected, and perhaps never desired.