Rust directs himself and niece Alexis Madsen while shooting a scene from "David Mows Yards" behind Gehlen Catholic Elementary. (contributed) [Click to enlarge]

"I'm pretty starved for attention," admits Paul Rust, a University of Iowa student from Le Mars, half an hour before playing some six characters on stage in the UI Theater B one Friday evening. At the end of each week at 11 p.m., the lights go on for No Shame Theater's weekly show of unrehearsed skits and monologues, a show as crazy as an episode of "Saturday Night Live," but spiked with more wit, lyricism, literary allusions and oblique social critiques.

It is, in other words, a cross-section of a college kid's mind, and since his freshman year Rust has been a part of that proscenium-arched anatomy. Outside it, the show goes on as Rust plays himself -- a senior majoring in cinema who has grabbed the serious attention of his mentors.

"He has an easy and natural facility with film language which is very rare," says David Gothard, producer of several Hanif Kureishi films (including Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle "My Beautiful Laundrette"), currently teaching at the UI. "He is relaxed in that language. His quiet confidence in the stories that he has to tell is staggering."

Last summer, Rust filmed his second major, personal film project, "David Mows Yards," around Le Mars where he grew up. In the film which he wrote, directed and appears in, Rust plays "a boy named David who needs to make money for college, in the summer before college." Casting himself as David was not too difficult; fondly, many people tell him "I don't know if you're 22 or 12."

In "David Mows Yards," David's clientele is comprised of widows, old women who are "hiring him because they're lonely -- their families have moved away, their husbands have died -- so I'm there to fill that void and keep them company. They also have this sense there are some things in their lives that are unfulfilled, and they have me help them fulfill those."

"The movie is about that point between childhood and adulthood, when you have to choose if you're going to be selfish or selfless and caring for people."

Only 20 minutes of "David Mows Yards" have gone past Paul's editing, and some members of the cast -- friends and neighbors in Le Mars -- have been asking for the finished piece. "All the women I shot the movie with have been coming up to my parents to ask 'Does he have the movie done yet?'" Rust promises to finish production -- with the operation done in his dormitory room -- by Christmas.

Gothard has praise in advance. "Paul has tales of Iowa to tell," he says, "but he has a delicacy and wit of touch that it's as if his works came out of Prague and its legendary Film School during the brilliance of the Czech New Wave that included Milos Foreman. . . . I am astonished at the natural brilliance and talent of Paul's work."

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Rust, who studied at Gehlen Catholic from kindergarten through high school, first thought of studying theater in college, but "because of the way the University of Iowa works, you don't have to be a theater major to do theater. But I've been interested in cinema longer. I have a better grasp of the history of cinema."

His knowledge of the cinema could not have begun more innocently. "I know it's a cliche but seriously, I've been interested in film as long as I can remember, even since I was a little kid. I remember the first time I went to the movies, and it was the movie Gremlins. That came out in 1984. I remember being fascinated by it, and as a kid I would ask my mom questions about the movies."

Later, seeing "ET" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" made him do more than ask questions. With a home video camera, Rust made his first movie in the summer of 1992. He was eleven years old.

"It was called 'The Single Man.' It was a comedy about a guy who meets a girl who ended up being the girlfriend of this Mafia kingpin. I just kept shooting, and it ended up two and a half hours long!"

More than a decade later, Rust's taste in cinema has moved from the formally strict genre of family entertainment to the films of Alexander Payne, the famed director of "Election" and more recently, "About Schmidt." "They're really great movies about the Midwest. They're funny, but if you look at them in a deeper level, there's something sad underneath. That's really interesting to me, when people don't know if it's tragedy or comedy that they're watching."

Sasha Waters, Rust's professor in the UI, notes that same poise between the tragic and the comic when she describes his work. "Paul's video work looks at, among other themes, the obsessive self-documentation of contemporary American culture (and its attendant narcissism) and the mediated nature of identity in a technological age," she says. "But to say just this implies that the work is somehow heavy and dark when it is in fact hilarious and brave and weirdly pleasing to watch even when it is appallingly uncomfortable."

"There's a certain genre of movies that I'm really interested in," Rust says regarding future work in film. "Movies with characters like Ernest P. Worrell and Pee-wee Herman. These movies are really interesting because they're about man-children: grown men who act like kids."

"I have a really big interest in childhood. There's always a point where you're discovering things about the evils of the world. People who are 30 who experience the evils of the world are kind of like accustomed to them. And I think what I'm interested in is those points when you're growing up and find out that some things aren't right, are a little murky."

"The discovery of the world where people can do bad things to each other, is interesting to me, because in childhood, those things still matter."

Should Rust eventually explore these themes through film, expect lots of laughter, clowning around and a chance to grow up vortically into childhood's silly innocence through serious art.