I'm just going to get straight to it. The writing, directing, and acting for today's episode is absolutely superb.

Howdy. I'm Jeff Goldsmith, and this is the Q&A. My agenda is simple. Each week I plan to bring you

in-depth insights into the creative process of storytelling. And folks, I have a heck of an episode for you today

because we get into the TV series, The Tattoist of Auschwitz, which is eligible

at this year's Emmys for Best Limited Series, along with all the regular acting, writing,

and directing awards it would deserve as well. And I'm pleased to have with us today our guest,

producer, Claire Mundell, and director Tali Shalomezer. I love this show. It's really just extraordinary.

And I wanted to do a podcast for this. And we made it happen. I recorded this at midnight,

L.A. time. Claire is in Scotland. And Tali was in Tel Aviv. So we span the world to get you this

podcast. And it is a very in-depth look. Now, don't worry, just like all of our

podcasts, if you haven't yet seen it, the first part of this is spoiler-free, and then we get

into spoiler-specific stuff after a very clear spoiler announcement. If you haven't seen the tattooist

of Auschwitz, you could see it on Peacock. You could watch all the episodes

there, so I highly suggest that you do that. But look, it's based on a fascinating, true story

of a best-selling book, and I got to say, all the actors' performances are fantastic. Jonah Howard

King was amazing. Melanie Linsky was amazing, as always, but this is actually, in my opinion,

a career high for Harvey Keitel. He just really inhabited the role in a way that we've never

seen him before because he's never played a character like this before. There is a deep vulnerability

of this character who is truly haunted looking back on his past, which is something that obviously is not in the book.

Because the book is a recounting of what that character went through in real life, and he's looking back at his life,

but it takes place mainly in the 1940s during World War II and the Holocaust.

So the show really added another layer to the book technically by having the character of Lolly both live in the past and in the present recounting what happened to him in the past, still affected by it, of course, all these years later.

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