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Right before her canine companion almost dies, my conversation with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There is a lag on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She desires to talk about entryways. Each response comes filled with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and nerve-wracking – and smart. She wants to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Star

Now 77, the film industry’s most humble star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her character in the literary group 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 always better when you avoid seeing me,” she says, “or see them, because it turns quite odd, you know? I suppose I mean: it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We both talk, stop, interrupt each other again, a car crash of chatter. Yes, 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. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m not exactly sure what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

In any case, in the sequel to Book Club, a follow-up to the 2018 hit, Keaton once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, eccentric, 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 propose they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, 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 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 gamely. “About six in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” Currently 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has launched a white blend and a red variety, 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: “Maybe then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a heavy drinker and you can really push her around. It makes it much easier if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Movie’s Focus

The first Book Club made eight times its cost by serving 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’s less integral to the plot. There’s some stuff about fatalism. “Not something I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all deal with.” A cryptic silence. “And then, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

Regarding her character’s big monologue about holding onto youthful hopes? “I’m sort of 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 shops and structures that have been largely destroyed. They’re no longer there!”

Why are they so haunting? “Because life is unsettling! 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 not that at all! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. Los Angeles is not, ultimately, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your uppers. Anyone on the sidewalk is noticeable – the actress particularly. Does anyone 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? “Oh, I can’t. Goodness, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re locked up! You want me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You can use this: ‘I was talking to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got thrown in jail cause she tried enter old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

Building Aficionado

Actually, Keaton is a true architecture specialist. She’s made more money renovating properties for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a society through its city design, 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 entryways and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Yes. Actually, I’m gazing at them right now.” She likes to imagine the exits and entrances, “the individuals who lived there or what they offered or why is it empty? It prompts reflection about all the aspects that more or less all of us experience. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not working out very well, but then, you know, something crept in.

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

Which model does she have?

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

Does she go fast? “No. What I prefer to do is look, so I can have issues with that, when I neglect the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. God, be careful. Focus forward. Don’t begin looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like hearing outtakes 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 stark difference with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most disarming today is how similar she seems from her screen self.

“I think the degree of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a person 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 person and as an artist.”

On a particular day, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her observe the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is truly fascinated. She possesses all of that depth in her soul.” Even somewhere 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.” In some way, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is usually described as modest. That somewhat underplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a film icon. She is completely 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 outskirt in 1946, the eldest of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an real estate broker, her mother won the regional title in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Seeing her crowned on stage evoked a blend of pride and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and unfulfilled – shutterbug, collagist, ceramicist and journal keeper (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her writings, are as much about her mother as, for example, {starring|appearing