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Right before her dog almost dies, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is disorderly. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a milk float. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She wants to talk about entryways. Each response comes stacked with qualifications. It’s fun and stressful – and smart. She wants to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Most Self-Effacing Star

Now 77, Hollywood’s most humble star avoids video calls. Nor does her character in the literary group films, the newest of which begins with her struggling to speak via her computer to best friends played by Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s always better when you don’t see me,” she says, “or see them, because it becomes so strange, you know? I suppose 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 collision of chatter. Yes, 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 pause. “I think a little goes plenty,” she says. “That is, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

In any case, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a follow-up to the 2018 success, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, quirky, fond of men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We borrowed a bunch of ideas from her life,” says filmmaker Bill Holderman, who co-wrote with his wife, Erin Simms, who speak to me over Zoom a few days later. Keaton did suggest they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the original movie, the widowed Diane hooks up with the actor. In the follow-up, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Cue big dinners, long sequences (frocks, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

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

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white and a red, but both are designed to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the really hardened wino. Nevertheless, she’s keen to embrace the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a heavy drinker and you can easily influence her. It simplifies things if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Film’s Theme

The original Book Club made 8x its budget by catering to undercatered over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women differently shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It’s less integral to the plot. There’s some stuff about destiny. “Not something I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all face.” A cryptic silence. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

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

What makes them so eerie? “Because life is unsettling! You have an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it should be, or what it might become. But it’s far from it! It’s just things going up and down!”

I’m struggling slightly to picture it. Los Angeles is not, ultimately, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your uppers. Anyone on the pavement is noticeable – Diane Keaton especially. Does anyone ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. My God, I’d be arrested 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 bet.”

Architecture Expert

Actually, Keaton is a true architecture specialist. She’s made more money flipping houses for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a society through its city design, she says.: “I believe they’re more evident in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s entirely different from things here. It’s less frantic.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of doors and shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Yes. Actually, I’m gazing at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the comings and goings, “the individuals who lived there or what they sold or why is it vacant? It prompts reflection about all the aspects that more or less all of us experience. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not succeeding very well, but then, y’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?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m luxurious. I’m very upscale. It’s black. Yes. It’s pretty good though. I enjoy it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I like to do is observe, so I can get in trouble with that, when I’m not watching the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. Heavens, watch out. Look ahead. Don’t begin gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

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 singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to plastic procedures, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more exposing than a turtleneck, makes for a stark difference 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 degree of similarity in the comparison of Diane as a person and Diane as an performer,” 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 person and as an actor.”

On a particular day, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her observe the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is truly fascinated. She has all of that texture in her being.” Even in more mundane, she’d still be jumping to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become self-aware.” Somehow, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is usually described as self-deprecating. That sort of underplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She is aware 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 life and being that to ponder the larger … There is no time or space for it.”

Background

Keaton was delivered in an LA suburb in 1946, the eldest of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an real estate broker, her mother earned the local crown in the Mrs America contest for accomplished housewives. Watching her crowned on stage prompted a mix of pride and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and unfulfilled – shutterbug, collage artist, potter and diarist (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her mother as, for example, {starring|appearing