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Right before her dog almost dies, my conversation with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Dialogue stops and starts like a milk float. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She desires to talk about entryways. Each response comes filled with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and nerve-wracking – and intelligent. She aims to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Now 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star avoids video calls. Nor does her role in the literary group films, the latest of which starts 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 avoid seeing 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. 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 brief silence. “I think a little goes plenty,” she says. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Once again, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a follow-up to the 2018 hit, Keaton once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, eccentric, fond of men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We borrowed a bunch of ideas from her life,” says filmmaker Bill Holderman, who collaborated 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 Andy García. In the follow-up, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long montages (dresses, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo and a surprisingly big part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

I felt amazed by the drinking, I say; is it accurate? “Absolutely,” says Keaton gamely. “Around 6 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 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 keen to embrace the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘I hear Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can really push her around. It makes it much easier if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Movie’s Focus

The first Book Club made eight times its budget by catering to overlooked 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 assigned reading is The Alchemist. It’s less integral 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. “And then, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about 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 – once more, a bit off-topic. “A habit most people avoid any more. And then exiting and snapping pictures of these stores and buildings that have been largely destroyed. They’re no longer there!”

Why are they so eerie? “Because life is haunting! 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 far from it! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I find it hard slightly to visualize it. Los Angeles is not, ultimately, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your last legs. Anyone on the pavement stands out – the actress particularly. Do people 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.”

Did she ever snuck inside 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 could write: ‘I was talking to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got incarcerated because she tried get inside old stores.’ Yes! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is quite the architecture expert. She has earned more money flipping houses for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a community through its urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more present in Italy. They’re more there with you. It’s entirely 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 looking 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 makes you think about all the aspects 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, y’know, something crept in.

“It’s truly interesting that we’re living, that we’re here, and that the majority who are fortunate have cars, which transport you all over the place. I adore my car.”

What type does she have?

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

Does she go fast? “No. What I prefer to do is observe, so I can have issues with that, when I neglect the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. God, watch out. Focus forward. Don’t begin gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Unique Persona

In case it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like listening to unused clips from Annie Hall sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to plastic procedures, for instance, and coloring, 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 think the degree of similarity in the comparison of Diane as a person and Diane as an actor,” says Holderman, “is unique. How she exists in the world, how she’s wired. She remains constantly 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 understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is genuinely fascinated. She possesses all of that depth in her soul.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine fixtures. “A lot of people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become self-aware.” Somehow, he says, she has not.

Keaton is usually described as modest. That sort of underplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think she knows she’s a film icon. She’s just so in the moment of her life and being 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 first 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. Seeing her honored on stage prompted a blend of satisfaction and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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