CRAIG DUFF: This is a big tub of tapes that’s underneath my desk here in the MFC on campus. This is actually a video of that time I got married — one time — it didn’t last. And this is me getting kicked off the stage by Steve Miller, who got mad at me for some reason. So these are videos of the beta cam tapes from my time at CNN. 

RUIXIN ZHANG: That was Medill Prof. Craig Duff reflecting on his early career in the video industry. He is a two-time Emmy-award winner, a video producer for big outlets such as CNN and The New York Times, and it turns out he is an actor too. I sat down with Prof. Duff to chat with him about these experiences. 

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From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Ruixin Zhang. This is Fieldnotes for What’s New at NU, a special podcast series about who Northwestern professors are, or were, beyond the CTECs. 

RUIXIN ZHANG: Prof. Duff, what was it like to work in the earlier stages of the video industry, and what were some projects you worked on? 

CRAIG DUFF: When smaller cameras became broadcast quality, you could go out on your own and do these sorts of things. I bought a small camera kit, a Canon XL1, and I went to Bangladesh and India, the Dominican Republic, South Africa and Mozambique, and looked at how a little bit of technology is helping people develop communities.

Before there was this sort of compact thing, you had to really have a crew. When I worked professionally at CNN, I was a producer. I would have a correspondent working with me, and then I would have a photographer and a sound person, so it’d be the four of us going off doing things. 

It was great. Then I went to The New York Times — produced documentaries for them. I was in Iraq, looking at how people were trying to find Saddam Hussein after he had gone into hiding after the invasion. I followed how the press covers politics in the George W. Bush reelection campaign against John Kerry, and I looked at how the press covered it. There’s a piece about Homeland Security that aired on Discovery Channel called “Are You Safer?” And then I went to the Arctic regions of the world, in Norway and Russia and Canada and the U.S., and did a film about the future of the Arctic Ocean called “Arctic Rush.”

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RUIXIN ZHANG: What was the most rewarding project for you? 

CRAIG DUFF: I don’t think I have a project that is the most rewarding to me. I kind of look at all of them as each of them is a part of who I am now, that each of these experiences and producing each of them informed my view of the world and how I navigate myself in the world. Some of them won awards. Some of them were simple, but just a lot of fun. 

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RUIXIN ZHANG: Can you give an example, then, of how a project taught you something about yourself?

CRAIG DUFF: I really love the camaraderie of working with a team at CNN, and each of us bringing our best game to things. When I started doing things on my own, it became a little bit more lonelier, but I was still able to go out and do some pretty amazing things and have great experiences. 

I’ve been very lucky over the years that I’ve been able to meet people, and I’ve developed skills to make people feel comfortable with me and for me to be comfortable with them and to have good experiences in the work that I’ve done. And people are gonna treat me well because I’m treating them well. 

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RUIXIN ZHANG: How did your different identities develop? 

CRAIG DUFF: I often think of myself as just Craig, and Craig is made up of a bunch of different things.  

From a young age, I have been very interested in filmmaking and visual media. And I’ve also been interested in being a performer, and acting on stage, doing magic, putting on plays in the basement, all kinds of things.

And I remember when I was a kid, being fascinated by the 16-millimeter projector where they showed films in class, and I tried to make one of my own. I had been doodling in the corners in the edges of books to make little flip book things,so that a little cartoon of a gorilla swinging on vines and trees, or a person walking or whatever. And I did one of those along wax paper strips, and I drew a little leprechaun cartoon, one frame at a time, trying to mimic the 60-millimeter film. 

And I got a shoebox, and I cut a hole in the front of it, and I found a lens from a slide projector. And I made old spools of ribbon, and I rigged up ways to have two spools there, and I had the thing go through. And then this long wax paper would come through. Behind that, I had a flashlight inside, and I thought I was going to make a projector. 

It didn’t work. But I tried at a young age to make my own movie projector. And then in college, I was an actor on stage, and I was involved in around 20 or 25 shows over the course of five years or so. And then I thought about pursuing an MFA in theater and acting, and there’s a debate on whether I got talked out of it or whether I chickened out.
But I ended up not pursuing it, and I went to grad school for film and television instead, which was a great decision — I went to University of Texas, I got out of Ohio — I sort of started to become a more mature person.

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RUIXIN ZHANG: How did you continue evolving as an actor then? 

My identities were always sort of developing at the same time. I really wanted to be an actor, and then I decided to be more of a filmmaker and a television producer. That took on its own life by working at CNN and then New York Times and then Time (Magazine). And a few years ago, it was actually during the pandemic, I started doing online courses in Shakespeare.

I’ve been a lifelong fan of Shakespeare. At this point, I have seen every production of every play by Shakespeare. I started becoming an actor again and brought that part of my identity back into the world. My acting training had helped me to do voiceovers to narrate my own pieces. So I just started studying a little bit, and then I had my first audition for this play called “Measure for Measure,” which is a Shakespeare comedy. I wrote down on the audition form just a small part I’ll play in the ensemble. 

After my audition, they said, “Well, why did you do that? Why don’t you want to be the Duke, which is the lead role?” And I’m like, “That’s a lot of lines, I haven’t done this in a long time. I don’t know if I could pull it off.” And so I was cast as the Duke in Measure for Measure in this raucous, crazy production with Olde School Shakespeare Collective in Chicago –– just a lot of great people, hilarious, filthy people. 

That kind of led me to start thinking about I had an experience doing Measure for Measure in the back of a bar in Ravenswood in Chicago, and the audience is just definitely laughing and roaring, or getting actually quite visibly angry at certain things that are happening in the play. And I thought, “Wow, this is this experience of being in the room together, telling a story together and being engaged with each other is not something that I do in any of the work that I’ve done, in major media, but it’s really an amazing experience.” 

And as I looked around and started thinking about all the things that are happening, all the digitization of everything, I thought, “What can we do where we can get in a room together or the equivalent of sitting around the campfire telling our tales? And how can I bring what I do to that?” And that evolved into my latest project, which is called “Sanctuary Stories.”

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RUIXIN ZHANG: Tell me more about “Sanctuary Stories.”

CRAIG DUFF: I reached out to my friend, Steve Franklin, who is like my big brother here in town. And he’s covered a lot of things, a lot of issues over the years, including immigration in Chicago. And I was on a Fulbright project last February in Pakistan, and it was the same time that the government funding was being cut for all these international programs. So I was seeing firsthand in Islamabad all these NGOs that were basically starting to freak out because the U.S. was cutting government funding. 
And so I thought, “Well, geez, that’s big, what’s happening in Chicago — that’s sort of an equivalent?” And I realized that immigration will be a big issue.

And I talked to Steve and said, “Let’s find a bunch of folks who have stories about immigration, we’ll do those interviews and we’ll turn those into monologues.” I could create video and audio that goes along with it and put together a show. So that developed into a series of monologues called “Sanctuary Stories,” which is about immigration in Chicago, and kind of concurrent while all this stuff is happening with ICE and Operation Midway Blitz.

It’s everything from a Venezuelan restaurant owner who’s losing her temporary protective status to a Rohingya refugee who fled Myanmar at the age of 11 and was tortured for a number of years and ended up coming here. And now he’s the proudest American I’ve ever met. 

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RUIXIN ZHANG: How did you get them to say yes? 

CRAIG DUFF: People want their stories to be told, sort of innately, in a lot of cases. You have a conversation about that: “I’m able to help other people see what’s happening with you and to try to understand what’s going on and to present it in a way that people will understand what you’re going through.”

So there’s a poem by Emily Dickinson that I use as a fun little way to talk about what makes a great documentary: 

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee. / And revery. / The revery alone will do, / If bees are few.” 

My version of that and what makes a good documentary is: 

“To make a documentary, it takes a person and their plea, / One person and a plea. / And empathy. / The empathy alone will do / If pleas are few.” 

As storytellers, we have this human empathy that we need to employ. Not that we believe everything someone says, but we do have an empathetic eye toward the people we approach in our stories and that we help the audience sort of understand through what this person is, what they want, and empathetically looking at how they get it. 

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RUIXIN ZHANG: Is there a project that you never got to do or a story you never got to tell?

CRAIG DUFF: None that I really regret or that I think are remarkable. I know that I’ve been very lucky and have been able to do a lot of things that I wouldn’t have dreamed of being able to do. I’ve also been very lucky in that I didn’t get into as much trouble as I might have if I had known really what was happening. 

I think it’s before the insurgency really kicked in, so it was right after the invasion of Iraq. Driving around Baghdad in an unarmored car at that time, people were doing it, and I was doing it, but just a few weeks later, it would have been impossible. I did hire a guy who was a former Air Force pilot to drive us out of Iraq and sort of take some back roads and stuff that he knew, just to be on the safe side. So he got us to the Kuwait border, and then we said goodbye in Basra and went back to Kuwait City. 

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RUIXIN ZHANG: If your students could only take away one thing from your class, what would it be? 

CRAIG DUFF: Don’t be an asshole. I’m saying that jokingly, maybe I shouldn’t say that on your first episode of your podcast. 

I think just being a decent person is going to serve you well across the board in this profession or any number of professions. Never burn bridges. Connect with people in a real way. 

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RUIXIN ZHANG: I would like to end with some more casual questions. First, what are some unconventional things you’ve eaten? 

CRAIG DUFF: I’ve eaten crickets in northern Thailand. I’ve had coagulated reindeer blood in northern Norway. I did one time eat porcupine in Vietnam. I’ve had guinea pigs in Peru –– it’s called “cuy.”

RUIXIN ZHANG: A famous person you’ve met? 

CRAIG DUFF: Jane Goodall. We had a little meeting with her at CNN because I was in the environment unit. The meeting was over, and she and I were chatting, and the people she was with were going off to a tour of CNN, and they were all the way down the hallway. 

A long way down the hallway, someone says, “Jane, we’re doing the tour.” And she looked and she looked back at me and she just shook my hand and said, “We’re going to make a difference.” And then she sprinted down the hallway, and she wrote me a personal note after this and in her own handwriting, and I was like, “Wow.”

RUIXIN ZHANG: What are three must-have items for when you travel to produce videos? 

CRAIG DUFF: If I know I’m traveling to a place that will be kind of rough, it’s almost like a sleeping bag, but it’s just a liner, like a silk sheet that zips up so you can basically sleep on any surface, but you’re sleeping inside your own little silk sheet. A hat, because if you see my picture, you’ll know that I need that. Otherwise, my head will burn. And good shoes with ankle support.

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RUIXIN ZHANG: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Ruixin Zhang. Thanks for listening to the first episode of Fieldnotes for What’s New at NU. This episode was reported by and produced by Ruixin Zhang.

The audio editor is Wallis Rogin. The multimedia managing editors are Ruby Dowling, Isabella Jacob and Matt Wasilewski. The editor-in-chief is Anavi Prakash.

Follow us on X and Instagram @thedailynu. 

Email: [email protected] 

Related Stories:
— Q&A: Emmy Award-winning Prof. Craig Duff brings journalism skills to Chicago theatre scene with ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’
— ‘Sanctuary Stories’ combines journalism and theater to spotlight Chicago residents’ response to immigration enforcement
— Medill faculty work to center diversity, equity and inclusion in and out of the classroom