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Actor and director Ricky Gervais, left, and Rob Lowe react to a question during a press conference for his film The Invention Of Lying during the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 14, 2009.Sean Kilpatrick

What would the world be without lies? "No art, no fictional television programs. If truth is the only choice, it's not a good world. There'd be no humour."

So quoth Ricky Gervais, philosopher, co-director and star of the new TIFF movie, The Invention of Lying, which had the first of three public screenings on Monday night. The movie stars Gervais as Mark Bellison, a man who discovers, for the first time, the positive power of not telling the truth. The movie also stars Jennifer Garner and Rob Lowe.

After poking around at various kinds of lying the cast members might allow (nice lies), someone asked about Kanye West's recent "fit of honesty" at Sunday night's MTV video awards, when he grabbed the microphone from best female video winner, Taylor Swift, and said Beyonce should have had the award instead.

"Did you say, 'Fit of publicity'?" asked Lowe. "I didn't quite catch that."

"There is a difference between honesty and bad manners," Garner said.

Lies, everyone agreed, are the grease that makes the world go round, or as producer Lynda Obst (author of the Hollywood memoir, Hello, He Lied) noted: "It's the fluid on which Hollywood runs."

And, perhaps a particularly American gift. As Gervais says of his character: "He's like the American Dream; the rest of the movie is England. In America you're told, 'You can grow up to be President of the United States.' English people say, 'Don't bother because it's not going to happen.' "

Though Gervais waxed philosophical on the subject of veracity, he admitted that his taste in humour is not particularly sophisticated. "I'll laugh at someone opening a door. You know the peekaboo game you play with babies? ... I still think it's funny."

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