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.

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 …