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Even before her canine companion almost dies, my conversation with Diane Keaton is disorderly. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a milk float. I had sent questions but she didn’t review them. She desires to talk about entryways. Each response comes stacked with caveats. It’s enjoyable and nerve-wracking – and intelligent. She aims to evade her own interview.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Star

Currently 77, the film industry’s most humble star avoids video calls. Nor does her role in the literary group films, the newest of which starts with her struggling to speak via her computer 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 suppose I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We converse, stop, talk over each other again, a collision of chatter. Indeed, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any nicer sound than Diane Keaton laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A pause. “I believe a little goes plenty,” she says. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Once again, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, 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 talk with me over Zoom a few days later. Keaton did propose they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the original movie, the bereaved Diane connects with Andy García. In the follow-up, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Cue big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

I felt amazed by the drinking, I say; is it accurate? “Oh yeah,” says Keaton enthusiastically. “Around 6 in the morning I’ll drink a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” Currently 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white and a red, but both are designed to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the recommended way of the really hardened wino. Nevertheless, she’s eager to run with the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘They say 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 original Book Club made eight times its cost by serving overlooked over-60s who loved 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. “Nothing I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all face.” A cryptic silence. “And then, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

Regarding her character’s big speech about hanging on to 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. “Which most people avoid any more. And then exiting and snapping pictures of these stores and structures that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so eerie? “Because existence is unsettling! You hold 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. Los Angeles is not, ultimately, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your last legs. Anyone on the pavement is noticeable – the actress particularly. Do people ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they aren’t interested. For the most part, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. My God, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re secured! You want me to go to jail? That would 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.’ Yeah! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

Actually, Keaton is a true 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 community through its urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more present in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s entirely different from things here. It’s not as driven.” While filming, she saw a lot of doors and posted 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 exits and entrances, “the individuals who lived there or what they offered or why is it vacant? It makes you think about all the facets that more or less 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 snuck in.

“It’s truly 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 love my car.”

What type does she have?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m luxurious. I’m really fancy. It’s a black car. Yeah. It’s quite nice though. I like it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I prefer to do is look, so I can have issues with that, when I’m not watching the road, I remember 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

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing outtakes from the classic film sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her dislike to plastic procedures, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more exposing than a turtleneck, creates a dramatic contrast with some of her film co-stars. But most charming today is how similar she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I think the degree of similarity in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an actor,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. How she exists in the world, her innate nature. She remains relentlessly in the moment, as a human and as an actor.”

One morning, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her study the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains truly fascinated. She possesses all of that depth in her being.” Even somewhere more mundane, she’d still be hopping up to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become self-aware.” In some way, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as modest. 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 life and existence that to ponder the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”

Background

Keaton was delivered in an LA outskirt in 1946, the first of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an real estate broker, her mother won the regional title in the Mrs America contest for accomplished housewives. Watching her honored on stage evoked a blend of pride and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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