Chatter from a weekend of festival interviews:

—The famously media-shy Coen Brothers show up for their roundtable interviews (for A Serious Man, opening October 2) looking like they just rolled out of bed five minutes ago. For which you gotta love them, especially compared to the hip hop star who was getting her make-up adjusted a minute before the press conference she was a part of started. (In 25 years of press conferences, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before).

—I can’t say I understood their movie much more after speaking with them, but the Coens did admit that they are hoping to get Jeff Bridges to star in their remake of True Grit. That’s right—the movie for which John Wayne won an Oscar is in development to be remade by the guys who gave us Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. (About the cult that has grown up around that film, known to its adherents as “Dudeism,” Joel Coen simply shakes his head and says, “Nobody’s more surprised than we are.”

—Alia Shawkat, formerly of Arrested Development and here in Drew Barrymore’s roller derby/girl power movie Whip It, when it came her turn to answer an ensemble question about what the most surprisingly thing about working with Barrymore was: “She smells really good.” No one asked the logical follow-up question—“Why were you surprised by that?”

—Comment Most Likely To be Repeated Out of Context: Drew Barrymore says, “I love to get plastered with my friends on Saturday night.” The context is how much work she puts in during the rest of the week as the head of a film production company. Let’s see if that one appears on TMZ.

—It takes a lot to score the biggest laugh when Ricky Gervais is in the room, but Rob Lowe managed that feat at the press conference for The Invention of Lying. Occupying the front row was a geeky-looking fellow wearing what appeared to be a large bicycle helmet with something that looked like an iPod attached to the top of it. Apparently broadcasting a live weblog of the proceedings, he explained that he gear was “the Virgin Radio Head Cam.” To which Lowe responded, “Here’s a word of advice—don’t wear that in public and you won’t be a virgin anymore.”

—Terry Gilliam, whose The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus opens in December, is one of the nicest people I’ve ever interviewed.

It’s weird to turn on the TV or look at the Toronto newspapers, all of which are covering the film festival in endless detail yet seem to be attending one in an alternate universe to the one I’m in. Of course, this is because they have the time, the inclination, and the staff to cover things like the red carpet premieres, when people line up for hours to catch a glimpse of this or that performer getting from the limo into the theater where their movie is about to show. The amount of press trying to get onto the red carpet has gotten so out of hand that the festival has just announced a lottery policy: get there three hours in advance and you can be entered in a drawing under which you might be able to win a chance to stick a microphone in someone’s face.

Real people, on the other hand, spend their days hanging outside the fronts of hotels where stars are rumored to be staying. Unfortunately I have business in these hotels, and I tell you, it’s not fun exiting into a crowd of stargazers and seeing the disappointment on their faces as they register that I Am Nobody.

But I’m here to see movies, and occasionally it’s possible to squeeze a few in amidst the round of interviews and roundtables and interviews. I was surprised at how much I liked Gasper Noe’s Enter the Void, which can best be described as 160 minutes of a dead junkie’s soul roaming nighttime Tokyo seeking redemption. I was disappointed by Whip It, Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut set in the world of roller derby. Much better were Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, aka Heath Ledger’s Last Movie and the Coen Brothers’ weird A Serious Man. (Well, aren’t all the Coens’ movies kinda weird? Yes, but this is the weirdest yet.)

The breakout discovery of the festival so far seems to be The Trotsky, a smart and very funny comedy with a perfectly cast Jay Barushel as a teenager who thinks he is the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. You don’t have to know much about the real Trotsky to enjoy the movie, which will hopefully get a US distribution deal despite being a Canadian feature. (I don’t know why more Canadian films don’t get released in the US. Except for the ones from Quebec, they’re in English.)

As for the films I’ve missed—well, I’m trying not to think about those. I just came back from trying to see Capitalism: A Love Story, the new Michael Moore documentary, at one of the public screenings, but gave up after I realized I would have to stand in line for at least an hour with no guarantee of getting a seat. It opens in Buffalo first weekend in October, so I guess I can wait that long.

The Toronto Film Festival has had its share of coups in its 34 years, but this one has to be the greatest ever: the late Matt Damon has risen from the grave to do a press conference!

OK, he wasn’t really dead, but there was a persistent—if idiotic—rumor circulating on the internet yesterday. At a very funny press conference for his new movie The Informant! (I don’t know why the exclamation point is part of the title, but it is), Damon first addressed the rumor by “admitting” that he started it himself—“I just wanted some attention!”

But really, he was astonished at how much traction the rumor got. “I had to call my parents and everything. It’s a really reckless thing to do. I don’t even know why someone would think that’s funny. My publicist got all these phone calls from very reputable sources. I got forwarded the story, which if you read it just gets sillier and sillier. By the end this guy that is supposed to be my agent is just quoting the “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” lyrics. But CNN called, the Boston Globe called, all these reputable news sources. The misinformation, it can get around quickly because you motherfuckers are lazy! There, I said it. Bastards.”

Needless to say, he’s telling us this with a big smile on his face. (When someone address a question to “Mr. Damon,” he says, “Sure, now that I’m dead I get respect! Are my angels wings intimidating you?”) There are seven people here representing The Informant!, but it’s Damon’s show, and he’s having a swell time. The movie is based on the story of Mark Whitacre, the highest-ranked whistleblower in US history, who exposed an enormous price fixing scheme at Archer Daniels Midland in the 1990s. But Whitacre was hardly the ideal whistleblower: as became clear only later to the FBI, the biophysicist and executive was bipolar and subject to what can best be defined as a rich fantasy life.

Half of what Damon said this morning has to be put in print with disclaimers noting that he’s only kidding, folks. Like when he answers the standard “Why did you take this role” query with “The only reason I did this movie was for an Oscar nomination.” (He claims to have modeled his performance on Julia Roberts in Erin Brokovich, also directed by Steven Soderbergh, with the same goal in mind.)

To play this goofy character, Damon wore a silly moustache and wig and put on 30 pounds of extra weight. He says that when he asked Soderbergh how he wanted the charcter to look, the director gave him a one-word reply: doughy.

“So those were my marching orders. The rationale behind it, I later found out—I didn’t question it, I just started eating—Steven didn’t want any hard edge to the charcter. he wanted him undefinded. So you couldn’t pin him down.

“I talked to Robert DeNiro, who put on 60 pounds for Raging Bull. He said, the first 15 pounds are really fun, then you have to go to work after that. I found all 30 pounds fun.“

When one journalist seems surprised that he would call DeNiro for this, Damon points out that they worked together before, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know the guy. He imagines how he might have sounded cold-calling: “Is this Robert DeNiro? I’m a young actor…. Did you ever see Mystic Pizza? I’m in that. How about School Ties?”

Pressed to say something about any emotional downsides of such rapid weight gain, Damon is having none of it.

“It felt fantastic, I’ve never had that much fun making a movie. Really. I just ate whatever I wanted to and thought about nothing but the screenplay and the other actors. Especially compared to one of the Jason Bourne movies where I have to come home after a day’s shooting and go to the gym. That takes way too much time away from my family. I just prefer to eat. “

I haven’t yet had time to buy my copy of the official Festival program book, so I do something I always enjoy—going to a movie that I know absolutely nothing about. Well, I do know that Creation is one of the Festival’s Gala (that is to say, Big Deal) films, and that it was directed by Jon Amiel, one of those British filmmakers who went from TV success (“The Singing Detective”) to a middlebrow film career. That pleasant sense of suspense is dissipated in the first frame of the film, where title proclaim it a biography of Charles Darwin on the anniversary of his birth. I watch enough of this BBC Films production to figure out that it will so OK but not tremendous arthouse business before I leave to check into my hotel.

(Maybe that was a bad call: what if the increasingly vocal right-wing nutcases try to get it banned from American theaters for promoting evolution? Stupider things have been happening lately.)

My hotel is at one end of the financial district, and the theater where tonight’s movies will be screened at the other, so I have a pleasant 20 minute walk each way. It’s amazing to see how much bigger and higher Toronto gets every year, with more and ore skyscrapers in development (among them the new home of the Festival, to where it will move from it’s 30 year home in toney Yorktown next year.)

This growth is underscored by the opening material shown before each of the Festival films, which this year includes a sequence from that all-time hoser classic Goin’ Down the Road (1971), the story of two Newfoundlanders who move to the big city of Toronto to make their way in the world. (Plot summary: they don’t.) If you can find it its worth checking out to see how Toronto looked less than 40 years ago.

Tonight’s films sart with are The Invention of Lying, a fantasy written and co-directed by Ricky Gervais about an alternate universe where people always tell the truth. He plays the first man in history to conceive of the benefits of lying, and in the movie’s best scenes becomes a messiah. The parody of religion is terrific, but unfortunately not at the center of what is at heart an oddball romantic comedy.

Next is The Informant, in which Steven Soderbergh mixes his big box office and indie auteur sides to tell the mostly true story of a whistle blower who had more than a few of his own secrets to hide from the FBI agents he was working with. It opens next Friday in Buffalo, and tomorrow morning we’ll see what Soderbergh and stars Matt Damon, Scott Bakula and Melanie Lynskey have to say about it.

I hate to whine (not that you’d know it given the amount of whining I seem to do), but I’ve been in Toronto for barely seven hours and I’m already exhausted.

Gone are the days when I could see 50 movies over the 10 days of the festival. Now that my job is to get interviews first and to see movies second, it seems all but impossible to make a schedule without having major holes in my schedule every day. And I swear that the studios are scheduling their screenings in a competitive way: it’s not good enough that they get you to see their movie, they want to make sure that you miss a big competitor while you’re at it.

That’s probably unduly paranoid, but what’s inarguable is that in the past decade, as Toronto has grown to become a showcase for the kind of movies that Hollywood is proud to brag about (as opposed to the ones they make money from), this festival has become ridiculously toploaded. The festival lasts for 10 days, but most if not all of the high profile films are shown in the first few days. Sure, over the weekend you can get to talk to George Clooney and Matt Damon and Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner and on and on. But by Monday afternoon, they’re all on the way back home.

So scheduling for the film journalist who also loves watching movies is a major nightmare. Every choice you makes seems to shut off three other opportunities. That’s why I find it best not to even look at the screening schedule until the last minute: why torment myself with all the movies I’ll have to miss?

The press screenings started at noon today. I opted for Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, which reputedly had ‘em puking in the aisles at Cannes, partly because von Trier will be doing a rare press conference here (albeit by satellite from Europe—he doesn’t fly), but also because I figure the bulk of the press corps will either be at the new Pedro Almodovar movie or ogling Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body. But Antichrist is sold out, and I sit in the first row of a theater that has seats built way too close to the screen—for a movie that’s going to be in my face anyway. It turns out to be two thirds dull talk and one third unwatchable violence, with a finale that can only be described as a distaff equivalent of the climax of Marco Ferreri’s The Last Woman. (You can’t accuse me of being a spoiler if I reference a movie just about no one has ever seen.)

More later …

On Friday Hallwalls will screen Transsexual Menace, a 1996 documentary about transgendered people defining themselves and fighting for their rights. The film was directed by Rosa von Praunheim, Germany’s most vital contributor to the history of queer cinema and an ongoing favorite at Ways In Being Gay. ArtVoice contributor Ed Grant interviewed von Praunheim in Manhattan last month. His interview will appear in the next issue of ArtVoice; in the meantime, here are some video clips of the interview (which you can also see at Media Funhouse, the blog for Grant’s popular public access show celebrating “High Art and Low Trash”).

Rosa von Praunheim on his 1990s “outing” campaign

Rosa von Praunheim on camp humor-Media Funhouse

I was never a particular fan of David Carradine, “Kung Fu” having hit the airwaves just past the time when I broke my addiction to television. Nothing against him, mind you, I just never saw him in a role that really caught my attention. (I will shamefacedly admit to not having seen him as Woody Guthrie in Bound For Glory or the film he directed as a labor of love, Americana.) But I was always interested in him, as an outgrowth of having followed the career of his father, the character actor John Carradine.

The elder Carradine saw himself as a Shakespearian actor, and for all I know he may have been a fine one on stage. In movies, though, he was relegated to villainous roles in an endless stream of B horror movies. In the best of them, he took over the role of Dracula from Bela Lugosi and reconceived it. As for the worst of them, well, there are dozens of them, and you can’t believe he was ever so desperate for money as to bother appearing in them.

David Carradine spoke at times of his carreer as having started as an act of revenge against what happened to his father. I don’t know if his brothers Keith and Robert shared that; the fact that there are so many Carradines in the business alone is a kind of revenge.

He certainly inherited his father’s work ethic, having made more than 220 appearances in film and on television. You’d be hard pressed to name more than a few of them, and when he did show up in a hit, like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, most people reacted as if he’d just come out of retirement.

(For all that Tarantino likes to cast his childhood favorites in leading roles, it hasn’t helped a lot of their careers. Sure, Pulp Fiction did wonders for John Travolta. But can you name any of the 40 movies Carradine made after Kill Bill? DId Pam Grier and Robert Forster’s careers take off again after Jackie Brown? Did you ever see Lawrence Tierney again after Reservoir Dogs? Did Sonny Chiba breakthrough to the mainstream after Kill Bill?)

Anyway, Carradine is dead, and while I didn’t get the lump in the throat that fans of “Kung Fu,” it’s sad news anyway, for one of two reasons. If he did indeed kill himself, it flies in the face of a man who claimed to have found peace in spiritual studies. (He knew nothing about martial arts when he took the role of Caine, but the role piqued his interest.) Still, it might be even worse if the other theory is true, the one that has lead to hundreds of smirking blog posts all day today and which, if true, will append itself to the man’s name for as long as he is remembered. I suppose an accidental end to a good life is better than suicide as a remedy for a life no longer valued. But no one deserves to be remembered as a dirty joke.