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. “