UI grad relishes being part of Tarantino’s gang

Being an Inglourious Basterd has been a glorious experience for University of Iowa graduate Paul Rust.

Just being in an Oscar-nominated movie is pretty heady stuff for the up-and-coming actor, comedian, writer and musician - a self-proclaimed class clown who got his start on his hometown Le Mars Community Theater stage.

“I've always loved movies,” Rust, 28, says by phone from his home in Los Angeles, where he moved shortly after graduating from the UI in 2004. “Probably around junior high I became obsessed with films.”

He especially loved films by Quentin Tarantino, who wrote and directed the much-lauded World War II revenge fantasy in which Brad Pitt leads a band of Jewish-American soldiers, known as the Basterds, behind enemy lines to scalp Nazis.

“I had ‘Reservoir Dogs' and ‘Pulp Fiction' T-shirts I'd wear around like a big movie dork,” Rust says with a laugh. “I remember watching Quentin Tarantino accept an Academy Award for screenwriting for ‘Pulp Fiction.' If I'd known then that 15 years later one of his movies would again be nominated for an Oscar and I'd be in it - that would be pretty crazy.”

He won't be in the audience at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre on Sunday night, however.

“I'll be watching from home,” he says, since his nominated movie has a limited number of tickets available for the awards ceremony. “They only have 12 seats, so one won't be devoted to a guy not having any lines in the movie. It's an outrage! I should be there over Christoph Waltz!”

Rust is on-screen in a couple of key scenes as Pfc. Andy Kagan.

“I'm in the shot where we break Til Schweiger's character out of jail,” he says. “There's a wide shot of each Basterd in line walking toward the cell. It was an exciting time on the set. I'm thinking, ‘These are the Inglourious Basterds.' Even if I'm never in a movie in the rest of my life, 50 years from now, people will still really love this movie; it's important to them.

To know I got to be a part of that is really satisfying.”

He's also in the infamous baseball bat scene, where the biggest Basterd bashes Nazis' skulls with his mighty swings. Rust and company spent about four or five days on location on a former Nazi military base filming that scene.

“It was cool, because when we were watching it, we knew it was going to be a famous scene that people would talk about,” he says. “It was cool to be a witness to it. Every morning we would have to cover our hands in blood. It made me proud to know I'd join a long gallery of actors covered in blood in movies.”

He spent five or six weeks in Berlin shooting the film in October and November 2008, on sites he calls “in the middle of nowhere.”

Rewind to the spring of 2008 for a polar opposite experience, when Rust spent three months in Vancouver shooting the lead role in “I Love You, Beth Cooper,” directed by Chris Columbus.

“You couldn't probably find two directors more on opposite ends of the spectrum,” he says. “Both are successful, both make movies people like, but in methods, they go about it differently.

Chris makes movies with the audience constantly in mind; that results in the audience getting what they want. With Quentin Tarantino, he makes movies imagining himself as the audience.

To be specific and true to what he wants resonates to people who like his movies.

“Both end up pleasing audiences - they just go about it in different ways. They're both good guys, to boot.”