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Right before her canine companion nearly passes away, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is chaotic. There is a lag on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a delivery truck. I had sent questions but she didn’t review them. She desires to talk about entryways. Every answer comes filled with caveats. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and intelligent. She wants to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Star

Currently 77, the film industry’s most humble star avoids video calls. Neither does her character in the literary group films, the latest of which begins with her struggling to speak via her laptop 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 suppose I mean: it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s a bit unusual.” 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 more pleasant sound than the star laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A brief silence. “I think a little goes plenty,” she says. “That is, 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 again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, quirky, partial to men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed 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 already the second day of shooting.”

In the original movie, the widowed Diane hooks up with the actor. In the sequel, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long sequences (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much drink.

I felt amazed by the drinking, I say; is it true to life? “Absolutely,” says Keaton enthusiastically. “About six in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” Currently 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white blend and a red variety, but both are designed to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the really hardened wino. Nevertheless, she’s keen to run with the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘I hear Diane Keaton is a heavy drinker and you can really push her around. It simplifies things if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made 8x its cost by catering to overlooked over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women differently 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. “Nothing 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 speech about holding onto youthful hopes? “I’m sort of addicted to getting in my car and driving through the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit off-topic. “A habit most people don’t do any more. And then getting out and photographing these stores and structures that have been largely destroyed. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so eerie? “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 find it hard slightly to visualize it. LA is not, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your uppers. Anyone on the sidewalk is noticeable – the actress particularly. Does anyone ever ask what she is up to? “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 arrested because they’re secured! 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 learned she got thrown in jail because she tried enter old stores.’ Yes! I imagine.”

Building Aficionado

Actually, 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 society through its urban planning, she says.: “I think they’re more evident in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s entirely different from things here. It’s less frantic.” While filming, she saw a lot of entryways and shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. I adore doors. Yes. In fact, I’m gazing 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 empty? It prompts reflection about all the aspects that pretty much all of us go through. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not succeeding very well, but then, y’know, something crept in.

“It’s truly 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 love 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.”

Is she a speeder? “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, avoid that. Heavens, be careful. Look ahead. Don’t begin gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Unique Persona

If 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 unique actor in so many ways – her dislike to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more exposing than a roll-neck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most charming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.

“I think the amount of overlap in the Venn diagram 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 is constantly in the moment, as a person and as an artist.”

On a particular day, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her study 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 light fittings. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” In some way, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as self-deprecating. That sort of underplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a movie star. She is completely 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 born 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 skilled housewives. Watching her honored on stage evoked a blend of satisfaction and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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