In Sunday's Spotlight section I chat in my column with Hal Holbrook, who has played Mark Twain on stage for so many years that it can be hard to tell where the Oscar-nominated actor stops and where the author begins. He's appearing in "Mark Twain Tonight!" Friday and Saturday at the Saroyan Theatre.

I'd looked forward to this phone interview for a while, not so much because of the Mark Twain angle (although it was fun to hear him in character blast Wall Street greed and corruption on the day that the House of Representatives failed to pass the bailout bill) but because of a movie scene of his that has really stuck with me. And I'd always wanted to ask him about it.

In "Into the Wild," Holbrook portrays a lonely old man who meets the young and adventurous Chris McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch), the subject of the fact-based film, who decides he wants to give up his standard upper-middle-class American career trajectory to go live in the Alaska wilderness. Holbrook's character becomes a sort of grandfather figure to him, and in their final scene together they share an emotional moment of farewell. Both know that this is good-bye for good (although Hirsch's character wouldn't have truly realized the danger he was heading toward). There's a definite "pass the torch" theme at work, too: the older man stepping aside and letting the younger one move out into the world. The scene is such a moment of searing honesty on screen that the memory of it can still bring a tear to my eye. It's as if we we moved beyond acting and watched life itself unfold. Out of the thousands of movies I've seen, it's one of the handful of scenes that has remained indelibly stamped in my memory.

I asked him what he remembered about making that scene. He told me:

How natural it felt. How simple it was. It was mostly due to the way that Sean Penn directs actors, which is basically to let you alone. Trusting you that whatever you're going to give him is going to be OK. It's easier to arrive at a good moment like we had there in the Jeep. We knew this was an important scene, of course. We just sat in the Jeep together with our own thoughts while the crew set up the lights. We didn't talk to each other. It took about 20 minutes for the set-up. When the camera started to roll, we just played the scene. I think we only did one take. I remember looking at Sean and thought he was going to having me do another take, and he just gave me the thumbs up. And I knew that something special had happened.

Lots of other people did, too. Holbrook nabbed an Oscar nomination for the role.