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Even before her dog nearly passes away, my call with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She wants to talk about entryways. Every answer comes filled with qualifications. It’s fun and stressful – and smart. She wants to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Star

Now 77, Hollywood’s most humble star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her character in the Book Club films, the latest of which starts with her having difficulty to speak via her computer to best friends played by the renowned actress, 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 guess I mean: it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We converse, stop, interrupt each other again, a collision of chatter. Yes, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any nicer sound than the star laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A pause. “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.

Follow-Up Film

In any case, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a follow-up to the 2018 success, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, eccentric, partial to men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We stole 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 Andy García. In the follow-up, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Expect big dinners, long montages (dresses, shops, naked statues), endless double entendre and a remarkably large part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. 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 put her name to a white and a red, but both are designed to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s keen to embrace the fiction: “Maybe 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 stays quiet and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made eight times its budget by serving overlooked over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women differently affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their assigned reading 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 cryptic silence. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about her character’s big speech about holding onto youthful hopes? “I’m somewhat 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!”

Why are they so haunting? “Because life is haunting! 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 not that at all! It’s just things going up and down!”

I find it hard slightly to visualize it. LA is not, after all, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your uppers. Anybody on the pavement 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.”

Did she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. Goodness, 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 spoke to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got incarcerated because she tried enter old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is quite the architecture expert. She has earned more money renovating properties for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a society through its urban planning, she says.: “I think they’re more present in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s just so different from things here. It’s less frantic.” While filming, she saw a lot of doors and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love 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 offered or why is it empty? It prompts reflection about all the aspects that pretty much all of us experience. 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 the majority who are fortunate have cars, which take you all over the place. I adore my car.”

What type does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m fancy. I’m very upscale. It’s a black car. Yeah. It’s pretty good 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 remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. God, be careful. Focus forward. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Unique Persona

If 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 cosmetic surgery, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more revealing than a turtleneck, makes for a stark difference with some of her film co-stars. But most charming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.

“I believe the amount of overlap in the Venn diagram 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 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 comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains genuinely fascinated. She possesses all of that depth in her soul.” Even in more mundane, she’d still be hopping up to examine light fittings. “Many 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 modest. That somewhat downplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset 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 ponder the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”

Background

Keaton was born in an LA outskirt in 1946, the eldest of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an estate agent, her mother earned the local crown in the Mrs America competition for accomplished housewives. Seeing her honored on stage prompted a mix of pride and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a productive – and frustrated – photographer, collage artist, ceramicist and diarist (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her mother as, for example, {starring|appearing