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Even before her canine companion nearly passes away, my call with Diane Keaton is disorderly. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a milk float. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She desires to talk about doors. Each response comes filled with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and intelligent. She wants to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Most Self-Effacing Star

Now 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star avoids video calls. Neither does her role in the literary group films, the latest of which begins with her having difficulty to speak via her computer to best friends played by the renowned actress, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s always better when you avoid seeing me,” she says, “or see them, because it becomes so strange, you know? I guess I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a bit unusual.” We converse, stop, interrupt each other again, a collision of chatter. Yes, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any more pleasant sound than Diane Keaton laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A brief silence. “I think a little goes plenty,” she says. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 hit, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, quirky, fond of men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We stole a bunch of ideas from her life,” says filmmaker Bill Holderman, who collaborated with his wife, Erin Simms, who talk with me over Zoom a few days later. Keaton did suggest they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was by then the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the widowed Diane hooks up with the actor. In the sequel, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Expect big dinners, long montages (dresses, shops, unclad sculptures), 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 true to life? “Oh yeah,” says Keaton gamely. “About six in the morning I’ll drink a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has launched 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. Nevertheless, she’s eager to embrace the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can really push her around. It simplifies things if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made 8x its cost by serving undercatered over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women variously shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It’s less integral to the plot. It touches about fatalism. “Not something I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all deal with.” A gnomic pause. “And then, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

Regarding 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 – again, a bit tangentially. “A habit most people don’t do any more. And then exiting and photographing these shops and buildings that have been just decimated. They’re no longer there!”

Why are they so haunting? “Because existence is unsettling! You have 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 picture it. Los Angeles is not, after all, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the sidewalk is noticeable – the actress particularly. Does anyone ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they don’t care. For the most part, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’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 thrown in jail because she tried get inside old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Building Aficionado

Actually, Keaton is a true architecture specialist. She has earned more money renovating properties for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a society through its urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more evident in Italy. They’re more there with you. It’s just so different from things here. It’s not as driven.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of doors and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. I adore doors. Uh-huh. In fact, 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. 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 adore my car.”

What type does she have?

“Well, 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.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I like to do is observe, so I can have issues 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 looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Unique Persona

If it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like listening to unused clips from the classic film delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her dislike to plastic procedures, for instance, and coloring, and anything more revealing than a roll-neck, creates a dramatic contrast with some of her film co-stars. But most disarming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.

“I think the amount of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. How she exists in the world, her innate nature. She is relentlessly in the moment, as a human and as an artist.”

On a particular day, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her study the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is truly fascinated. She has all of that depth in her being.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine fixtures. “A lot of people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” Somehow, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as modest. That sort of underplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “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 experience and existence that to ponder the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”

Background

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

Dorothy was also a prolific – and unfulfilled – photographer, collagist, ceramicist and diarist (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her parent as, for example, {starring|appearing