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.