‘God, life is so strange’: Keaton on pets, entrances, wine and why she’s ‘really fancy’

Right before her dog nearly passes away, my conversation with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Dialogue stops and starts like a milk float. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She wants to talk about doors. Every answer comes filled with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and intelligent. She aims to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Currently 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star avoids video calls. Nor does her character in the literary group films, the latest of which begins with her struggling to speak via her laptop to best friends played by the renowned actress, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s always better when you don’t see 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 both talk, stop, interrupt each other again, a collision 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. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Once again, I’m not exactly sure what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a follow-up to the 2018 success, Keaton once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, 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 talk with me over Zoom a few days later. Keaton did suggest 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 hooks up with Andy García. In the follow-up, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Expect big dinners, long sequences (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless double entendre and a remarkably large part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

I was impressed by the drinking, I say; is it true to life? “Absolutely,” says Keaton gamely. “About six in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white blend and a red, but both are intended to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the recommended way of the truly seasoned 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 easily influence her. It simplifies things if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Movie’s Focus

The first Book Club made eight times its budget by serving undercatered over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women variously affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It’s less integral to the plot. It touches about destiny. “Nothing I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all face.” A cryptic silence. “And then, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

Regarding her character’s big monologue about hanging on to youthful hopes? “I’m somewhat addicted to getting in my car and cruising the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit tangentially. “A habit most people don’t do any more. And then exiting and snapping pictures of these shops and buildings that have been just decimated. They’re no longer there!”

What makes them so eerie? “Because existence is unsettling! You have an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it ought to be, or what it might become. But it’s far from it! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. Los Angeles is not, ultimately, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the pavement stands out – 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 rush and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. My God, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re secured! 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 enter old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She has earned more money flipping houses for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a society through its city design, 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 entryways and shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. I adore doors. Yes. Actually, I’m gazing 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 prompts reflection about all the aspects that more or less all of us experience. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not working out very well, but then, you know, something crept in.

“It’s truly interesting that we’re living, 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 a black car. Yeah. It’s pretty good though. I like it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I prefer to do is observe, so I can get in trouble with that, when I neglect the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. Heavens, watch out. Look ahead. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Unique Persona

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

“I believe the degree of overlap in the Venn diagram 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 is relentlessly in the moment, as a person and as an artist.”

On a particular day, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her study the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is genuinely fascinated. She possesses all of that depth in her soul.” Even in more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” In some way, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is usually described as self-deprecating. That sort of downplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think she knows she’s a film icon. She’s just so in the moment of her experience and existence that to ponder the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”

Early Life

Keaton was born in an LA suburb in 1946, the eldest of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an real estate broker, her mother won the regional title in the Mrs America contest for accomplished housewives. Seeing her honored on stage prompted a blend of satisfaction and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and frustrated – shutterbug, collagist, ceramicist and journal keeper (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her mother as, for example, {starring|appearing