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 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 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 tonight, however.
“I’ll be watching from home,” he says, since his nominated movie has a limited number of tickets for the awards ceremony.
In “Inglourious Basterds,” Rust is on the 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.
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.
He spent five or six weeks in Berlin shooting the film in October and November 2008.
In the spring of 2008, 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.”
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