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Right before her dog almost dies, my conversation with Diane Keaton is disorderly. There is a lag 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. Each response comes stacked with caveats. It’s fun and stressful – and smart. She aims to evade her own interview.

Hollywood’s Extremely Modest Star

Currently 77, Hollywood’s most self-effacing star avoids video calls. Nor does her role in the Book Club films, the latest of which begins with her having difficulty to speak via her computer to close companions 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 bit unusual.” We converse, 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 pause. “I believe a little goes plenty,” she says. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m not exactly sure what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, in the sequel to Book Club, a sequel to the 2018 hit, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, quirky, fond of 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. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the original movie, the widowed Diane hooks up with the actor. In the follow-up, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Expect big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a surprisingly big part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. So much booze.

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

In fact, Keaton has launched a white blend and a red variety, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the truly seasoned wino. Nevertheless, she’s eager to embrace the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a heavy drinker and you can easily influence her. It simplifies things if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Film’s Theme

The original Book Club made 8x its budget by serving undercatered over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women variously affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their homework is The Alchemist. It’s less integral 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 face.” A gnomic pause. “And then, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about her character’s big monologue about hanging on to 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 don’t do any more. And then exiting and snapping pictures of these shops and buildings 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 might become. But it’s far from it! It’s just things going up and down!”

I’m struggling slightly to picture it. Los Angeles is not, ultimately, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your uppers. Anyone on the pavement stands out – the actress particularly. Do people 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 thrown in jail because they’re locked up! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That would 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 get inside old stores.’ Yeah! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

Actually, 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 believe they’re more evident in Italy. They feel 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 posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. I adore doors. Uh-huh. Actually, I’m looking at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the exits and entrances, “the people who lived there or what they offered or why is it vacant? It makes you think about all the facets that pretty much all of us experience. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not working out very well, but then, y’know, something snuck in.

“It’s truly interesting that we’re alive, 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 fancy. I’m really fancy. It’s a black car. Yeah. It’s pretty good though. I enjoy it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I like to do is look, so I can have issues with that, when I neglect the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. Heavens, watch out. Look ahead. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like listening to unused clips from Annie Hall delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her aversion to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more revealing than a roll-neck, creates a stark difference with some of her film co-stars. But most disarming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.

“I believe the degree of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. Her way of being in the world, how she’s wired. She remains constantly in the moment, as a person and as an artist.”

On a particular day, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her observe the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains truly fascinated. She possesses all of that texture in her being.” Even in more mundane, she’d still be hopping up to examine fixtures. “Many people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become self-aware.” Somehow, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is usually described as self-deprecating. That somewhat underplays it. “Perhaps she’d kill me for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think she knows she’s a movie star. She is completely in the moment of her life and existence that to reflect on the larger … There is no time or space for it.”

Early Life

Keaton was delivered in an LA outskirt in 1946, the eldest of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an estate agent, her mother earned the local crown in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Watching her honored on stage evoked a mix of pride and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a productive – and unfulfilled – photographer, collage artist, ceramicist and diarist (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her parent as, say, {starring|appearing