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Right before her dog nearly passes away, my conversation with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There is a lag on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a milk float. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She desires to talk about doors. Each response comes stacked with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and intelligent. She aims to evade her own interview.

Hollywood’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Now 77, Hollywood’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Neither does her character in the Book Club films, the newest of which starts with her struggling to speak via her computer to close companions played by the renowned actress, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

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

A pause. “I believe a little goes plenty,” she says. “That is, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m not exactly sure what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, in the sequel to Book Club, a sequel to the 2018 success, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, eccentric, partial to men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We borrowed a bunch of ideas from her life,” says director Bill Holderman, who collaborated with his wife, Erin Simms, who talk with 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 first film, the widowed Diane connects with the actor. In the sequel, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Expect big dinners, long montages (dresses, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a surprisingly big part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. So much booze.

I was impressed 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.” Currently 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has launched a white and a red variety, but both are designed to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the recommended way of the truly seasoned wino. Nevertheless, she’s keen to run with the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a different kind 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.’ Absurd!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made eight times its cost by catering to undercatered over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women variously affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their homework is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. It touches about fatalism. “Nothing I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all deal with.” A cryptic silence. “And then, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about her character’s big speech about holding onto youthful hopes? “I’m sort of addicted to getting in my car and driving through the streets of LA,” she says – once more, a bit tangentially. “A habit most people avoid any more. And then getting out and photographing these stores and buildings that have been largely destroyed. They aren’t there!”

Why are they so eerie? “Because existence is unsettling! You have an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it ought to be, or what it might become. But it’s not that at all! 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 stands out – Diane Keaton especially. Does anyone ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. My God, 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 can use this: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got incarcerated because she tried get inside old stores.’ Yes! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

Actually, Keaton is a true architecture specialist. She’s made more money renovating properties for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a society through its city design, 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.” During the shoot, 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 likes to imagine the comings and goings, “the people who lived there or what they offered or why is it vacant? It prompts reflection about all the aspects that pretty much all of us go through. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not working out very well, but then, you know, something snuck 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.”

What type 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 like it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I like to do is observe, so I can have issues with that, when I neglect the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. God, watch out. Look ahead. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to unused clips from Annie Hall sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her aversion to plastic procedures, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more revealing than a roll-neck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most charming today is how similar she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I believe the amount of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a person and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is unique. Her way of being in the world, how she’s wired. She is relentlessly in the moment, as a human and as an actor.”

On a particular day, 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 in more mundane, she’d still be hopping up to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become self-aware.” In some way, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is generally described as self-deprecating. That somewhat downplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She knows she’s a movie star, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a movie star. She is completely in the moment of her experience and existence that to reflect on the larger … There is no time or space for it.”

Background

Keaton was born in an LA outskirt in 1946, the first 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 accomplished housewives. Seeing her honored on stage evoked a blend of pride and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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