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Right before her canine companion nearly passes away, my conversation with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There is a lag on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She desires to talk about entryways. Every answer comes stacked with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and intelligent. She wants to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Currently 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star avoids video calls. Nor does her role in the literary group films, the newest of which begins with her struggling to speak via her computer to close companions played by Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s always better when you avoid seeing me,” she says, “or see them, because it turns quite odd, you know? I guess I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We both talk, stop, talk over each other again, a car crash of chatter. Indeed, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any nicer sound than the star laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A brief silence. “I think a little goes plenty,” she says. “That is, don’t do much more.” Once again, I’m not exactly sure what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 hit, Keaton once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, quirky, fond of men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We borrowed a bunch of ideas from her life,” says director Bill Holderman, who co-wrote with his wife, Erin Simms, who speak to me over Zoom a few days later. Keaton did propose they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Perhaps ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the original movie, the widowed Diane hooks up with Andy García. In the sequel, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long montages (dresses, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much drink.

I felt amazed by the drinking, I say; is it accurate? “Absolutely,” says Keaton enthusiastically. “Around 6 in the morning I’ll drink a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has put her name to a white and a red, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s keen to run with the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘I hear Diane Keaton is a heavy drinker and you can really push her around. It makes it much easier if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made eight times its budget by serving overlooked over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women variously shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. It touches about destiny. “Nothing I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all deal with.” A cryptic silence. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about her character’s big monologue about hanging on to youthful hopes? “I’m somewhat addicted to getting in my car and driving through the streets of LA,” she says – once more, a bit off-topic. “A habit most people avoid any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these stores and buildings that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so eerie? “Because existence is haunting! You hold an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it ought to be, or what it could be. But it’s far from it! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I’m struggling slightly to visualize it. Los Angeles is not, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your uppers. Anybody on the sidewalk is noticeable – the actress particularly. Do people ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they aren’t interested. Generally, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. Goodness, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re locked up! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That would be better for you. You could write: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got incarcerated cause she tried get inside old stores.’ Yeah! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She has earned more money renovating properties for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a community through its urban planning, she says.: “I think they’re more present in Italy. They’re more there with you. It’s just so different from things here. It’s less frantic.” While filming, she saw a lot of entryways and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. I adore doors. Uh-huh. Actually, I’m gazing at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the comings and goings, “the people who lived there or what they offered or why is it vacant? It makes you think about all the aspects that pretty much all of us experience. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not working out very well, but then, y’know, something crept in.

“It’s just so interesting that we’re living, that we’re here, and that the majority who are lucky have cars, which take you all over the place. I love my car.”

Which model does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m fancy. I’m really fancy. It’s a black car. Yes. It’s pretty good though. I enjoy it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I prefer to do is look, so I can get in trouble with that, when I neglect the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. Heavens, be careful. Look ahead. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Unique Persona

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing outtakes from the classic film sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her dislike to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more exposing than a turtleneck, makes for a stark difference with some of her film co-stars. But most charming today is how similar she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I think the degree of overlap in the Venn diagram of Diane as a person and Diane as an actor,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. Her way of being in the world, her innate nature. She is constantly in the moment, as a human and as an actor.”

One morning, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her observe the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is truly fascinated. She has all of that texture in her soul.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine fixtures. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” Somehow, he says, she has not.

Keaton is usually described as self-deprecating. That sort of underplays it. “Maybe she’d kill me for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think she knows she’s a film icon. She’s just so in the moment of her experience and being that to reflect on the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”

Background

Keaton was born in an LA outskirt in 1946, the eldest of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an estate agent, her mother earned the local crown in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Seeing her honored on stage evoked a mix of satisfaction and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a productive – and frustrated – photographer, collage artist, ceramicist and diarist (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her writings, are as much about her mother as, for example, {starring|appearing