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Right before her canine companion nearly passes away, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is disorderly. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a milk float. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She wants to talk about doors. Every answer comes filled with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and smart. She aims to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Currently 77, Hollywood’s most humble star avoids video calls. Nor does her role in the literary group films, the newest 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 avoid seeing 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 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 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 uncertain what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 success, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, eccentric, partial to 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 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 the actor. In the follow-up, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Expect big dinners, long montages (dresses, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo and a surprisingly big part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. 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 drink a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” Currently 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has launched a white and a red, but both are intended 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: “Maybe then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can really push her around. It simplifies things if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The original Book Club made eight times its budget by catering to overlooked over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women variously shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. It touches about fatalism. “Nothing I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all deal with.” A cryptic silence. “Moreover, 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 tangentially. “A habit most people avoid any more. And then exiting and snapping pictures of these stores and structures that have been largely destroyed. They aren’t 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 could be. But it’s far from it! It’s just things going up and down!”

I’m struggling slightly to visualize it. LA is not, ultimately, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your uppers. Anybody on the sidewalk stands out – Diane Keaton particularly. Do people ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever sneak into 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’d be better for you. You could write: ‘I was talking to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got incarcerated because she tried enter old stores.’ Yes! I imagine.”

Building Aficionado

Actually, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She has earned more money renovating properties 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 just so different from things here. It’s not as driven.” While filming, she saw a lot of entryways and shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Yes. Actually, I’m looking at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the comings and goings, “the people who lived there or what they sold or why is it vacant? It prompts reflection about all the facets that more or less all of us go through. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not succeeding very well, but then, y’know, something crept in.

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

Which model does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m luxurious. I’m very upscale. It’s black. Yeah. It’s quite nice though. I enjoy it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I like to do is look, 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, be careful. Focus forward. Don’t begin looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Unique Persona

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing unused clips from the classic film delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her dislike to plastic procedures, for instance, and coloring, and anything more exposing than a roll-neck, 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 believe the amount of overlap 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 is constantly in the moment, as a person and as an actor.”

On a particular day, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her study the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is genuinely fascinated. She has all of that depth in her soul.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine fixtures. “A lot of people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” Somehow, he says, she has not.

Keaton is usually described as self-deprecating. That somewhat underplays it. “Perhaps she’d kill me for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She knows she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think she knows she’s a film icon. She is completely in the moment of her experience and existence 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 kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an real estate broker, her mother earned the regional title in the Mrs America competition for accomplished housewives. Seeing her crowned on stage evoked a blend of pride and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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