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Even before her dog nearly passes away, my conversation with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Dialogue halts and resumes like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She wants to talk about doors. Every answer comes stacked with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and smart. She wants to evade her own interview.

Hollywood’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Currently 77, Hollywood’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Neither does her character in the Book Club films, the latest of which begins with her having difficulty to speak via her computer to best friends 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 becomes so strange, you know? I guess I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We both talk, stop, interrupt each other again, a car crash of chatter. Indeed, 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 believe a little goes plenty,” she says. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Once again, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

In any case, in the sequel to Book Club, a follow-up to the 2018 success, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, 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 talk with me over Zoom a few days later. Keaton did suggest they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Perhaps ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the bereaved Diane hooks up with Andy García. In the sequel, the four companions 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 drink.

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

In fact, 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 serving suggestion of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s eager to embrace the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can easily influence her. It makes it much easier if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Movie’s Focus

The first Book Club made eight times its cost by serving overlooked 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 homework 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 an aspect of it, of what we all deal with.” A gnomic pause. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about 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 – once more, a bit tangentially. “Which most people don’t do any more. And then exiting and snapping pictures of these stores and structures that have been largely destroyed. They’re no longer there!”

What makes them so haunting? “Because existence is haunting! You hold an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it ought to be, or what it might become. But it’s far from it! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. LA is not, ultimately, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the pavement is noticeable – Diane Keaton especially. 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.”

Has she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. Goodness, I’d be arrested because they’re locked up! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You could write: ‘I was talking to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got thrown in jail cause she tried get inside old stores.’ Yeah! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is a true architecture specialist. She’s made more money flipping houses for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a community through its city design, 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 not as driven.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of entryways and shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. I adore doors. Yes. In fact, I’m looking at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the exits and entrances, “the individuals who lived there or what they sold or why is it vacant? It makes you think about all the facets that more or less all of us go through. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not succeeding 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 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. Yeah. It’s pretty good 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, don’t do that. Heavens, watch out. Focus forward. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Unique Persona

If 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 revealing than a turtleneck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her film co-stars. But most disarming today is how indistinguishable 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 performer,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. Her way of being in the world, how she’s wired. 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 remains truly fascinated. She has all of that texture in her being.” Even in more mundane, 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 hasn’t.

Keaton is generally described as self-deprecating. That sort of downplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She is aware she’s a movie star, but I don’t think she knows she’s a film icon. She’s just so in the moment of her experience and existence that to reflect on 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 children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an estate agent, her mother earned the regional title in the Mrs America contest for accomplished housewives. Watching her crowned on stage evoked a blend of satisfaction and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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