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Right before her canine companion nearly passes away, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is disorderly. There is a lag on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She desires to talk about doors. Each response comes stacked with caveats. It’s fun and nerve-wracking – and smart. She wants to evade her own interview.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Star

Currently 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star avoids video calls. Nor does her character in the Book Club films, the latest of which begins with her having difficulty to speak via her laptop to close companions played by the renowned actress, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s always better 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 bit unusual.” We converse, 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. “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 sequel to the 2018 success, Keaton once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, quirky, partial to men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We borrowed a bunch of ideas from her life,” says director 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. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was by then the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the widowed Diane hooks up with Andy García. In the follow-up, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long sequences (dresses, shops, unclad sculptures), endless double entendre and a surprisingly big part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. So much booze.

I was impressed by the drinking, I say; is it accurate? “Absolutely,” says Keaton enthusiastically. “Around 6 in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” Currently 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has launched a white blend and a red, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s eager to embrace the fiction: “Perhaps 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 makes it much easier if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made 8x its budget by catering to overlooked over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women variously shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their homework is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. It touches about fatalism. “Not something I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all deal with.” A cryptic silence. “And then, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

Regarding 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 – once more, a bit tangentially. “Which most people avoid any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these stores and buildings that have been largely destroyed. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so haunting? “Because life is haunting! You have an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it should be, or what it could be. But it’s not that at all! It’s just things going up and down!”

I’m struggling slightly to visualize it. Los Angeles is not, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anyone on the sidewalk is noticeable – Diane Keaton particularly. Do people ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. Goodness, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re locked up! You want 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 thrown in jail because she tried get inside old stores.’ Yes! I imagine.”

Building Aficionado

In reality, Keaton is a true architecture specialist. She has earned more money flipping houses for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a society through its urban planning, 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.” While filming, she saw a lot of entryways and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Yes. In fact, I’m looking at them right now.” She likes to imagine the exits and entrances, “the people who lived there or what they sold or why is it empty? It makes you think 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 snuck 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 love my car.”

Which model 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 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’m not watching the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. Heavens, be careful. Focus forward. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing unused clips from Annie Hall sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her aversion to plastic procedures, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more exposing than a roll-neck, creates a dramatic contrast 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 actor,” says Holderman, “is unique. Her way of being in the world, her innate nature. She is relentlessly in the moment, as a person and as an actor.”

One morning, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her study the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is truly fascinated. She possesses all of that depth in her soul.” Even somewhere 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 has not.

Keaton is generally described as self-deprecating. That somewhat downplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She is aware she’s a movie star, but I don’t think she knows she’s a film icon. She is completely in the moment of her experience and being that to ponder the larger … There is 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 estate agent, her mother won the local crown in the Mrs America competition for skilled housewives. Seeing her crowned on stage evoked a mix of pride and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a productive – and unfulfilled – shutterbug, collage artist, ceramicist and journal keeper (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her writings, are as much about her parent as, say, {starring|appearing