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Even before her dog nearly passes away, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is chaotic. There is a lag on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She wants to talk about entryways. Each response comes filled with qualifications. It’s fun and nerve-wracking – and intelligent. She aims to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Now 77, the film industry’s most humble star avoids video calls. Neither does her character in the Book Club films, the newest of which begins with her having difficulty to speak via her computer to close companions played by Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s preferable when you don’t see me,” she says, “or see them, because it turns quite odd, 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 car crash 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 believe a little goes plenty,” she says. “That is, don’t do much more.” Once again, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

Anyway, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 hit, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, eccentric, fond of men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed 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 propose they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Perhaps ‘Leslie’. But it was by then the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the bereaved Diane hooks up with the actor. In the sequel, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Cue big dinners, long montages (dresses, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. So much drink.

I was impressed 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? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has launched a white and a red variety, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the serving suggestion of the really hardened wino. Nevertheless, she’s eager to embrace 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.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The original Book Club made eight times its budget by serving overlooked over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women variously shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their homework is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. There’s some stuff about fatalism. “Not something I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all face.” A gnomic pause. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

What about her character’s big speech about holding onto youthful hopes? “I’m somewhat addicted to getting in my car and cruising 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 stores and buildings that have been just decimated. They’re no longer there!”

What makes them so haunting? “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 find it hard slightly to visualize it. Los Angeles is not, after all, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the pavement is noticeable – the actress especially. Do people ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they aren’t interested. For the most part, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. Goodness, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re secured! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You can use this: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got thrown in jail cause she tried enter old stores.’ Yes! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

Actually, Keaton is quite the architecture specialist. She’s made more money renovating properties for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern 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 entirely different from things here. It’s less frantic.” While filming, she saw a lot of entryways and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. Oh, I love doors. Yes. In fact, I’m gazing at them right now.” She likes to imagine the exits and entrances, “the individuals who lived there or what they sold or why is it empty? It makes you think about all the facets 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, you know, something crept in.

“It’s just so interesting that we’re living, that we’re here, and that most of us who are fortunate have cars, which take you all over the place. I adore my car.”

Which model does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m a bitch. I’m luxurious. I’m very upscale. It’s a black car. Yes. It’s quite nice though. I like it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I like to do is observe, so I can get in trouble with that, when I neglect the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. Heavens, watch out. Focus forward. Don’t begin gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to unused clips from the classic film sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her dislike to plastic procedures, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more exposing than a turtleneck, creates a dramatic contrast with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most charming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I believe the amount of similarity in the Venn diagram 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.”

One morning, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her study the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains truly fascinated. She possesses all of that texture in her being.” Even in more mundane, she’d still be hopping up to examine fixtures. “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 sort of underplays it. “Maybe she’d kill me for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She knows she’s a movie star, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a movie star. She’s just so in the moment of her experience and being that to reflect on 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. Her father was an real estate broker, her mother won the local crown in the Mrs America contest for accomplished housewives. Seeing her crowned on stage prompted a mix of pride and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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