Filmmaker Oliver Stone lavished praise on the Royal Bank of Canada at the Cannes Film Festival, where his sequel to Wall Street premiered Friday.

Other banks “were very arrogant” and wouldn’t cooperate to provide a backdrop for his movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Stone told The Hollywood Reporter. The film made its debut at Cannes and is reviewed by the Star’s Peter Howell.

“Our biggest break came when the Royal Bank of Canada called back, and they were extremely gracious. They said, ‘By all means, we’d love you to shoot here.’

About 80 Royal Bank employees who work on the brand new RBC trading floor north of Battery Park City in lower Manhattan got bit parts in the background of the weekend shoot, said bank spokeswoman Gillian McArdle.

“It was a lot of fun,” she said. Since no trading was disrupted, “we were really pleased to help him out.”

In fact, one bank employee had appeared in the original 1987 Wall Street, she said.

In exchange, the bank received a $20,000 honorarium, which it donated to Big Brothers and Big Sisters of New York, she said.

No fan of corporations generally, Stone distinguished Canada from the rest of the world during the economic crisis wrought by shady deals in global high finance.

“The Royal Bank of Canada was one of the few banks that behaved impeccably in this period and made a profit and continued on. And everyone applauded Canada’s behaviour because they had different rules. Europe was going down, the whole world was affected. But here was the Royal Bank of Canada – unlike the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was a disaster – the Royal Bank of Canada was impeccable!”

Not to mention photogenic and accommodating.

“That was a wonderful break for us, because it was a classy looking bank and gave us the right feeling that we needed” as a stand-in for Goldman Sachs, the New York banking and investment firm that first snubbed Stone.