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

Even before her dog almost dies, my conversation with Diane Keaton is disorderly. There’s a delay on the line. Dialogue halts and resumes like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She wants to talk about doors. Each response comes stacked with caveats. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and intelligent. She aims to evade her own interview.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Now 77, the film industry’s most humble star avoids video calls. Nor does her character in the Book Club films, the latest of which begins with her struggling to speak via her laptop to best friends played by Jane Fonda, 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 car crash of chatter. Yes, 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 uncertain what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

Anyway, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a follow-up to the 2018 hit, Keaton 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 speak to 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 first film, the bereaved Diane hooks up with the actor. In the follow-up, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Cue big dinners, long sequences (frocks, shops, naked statues), endless double entendre and a surprisingly big part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. So much drink.

I was impressed by the drinking, I say; is it true to life? “Oh yeah,” says Keaton gamely. “Around 6 in the morning I’ll drink a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” Currently 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has launched a white blend and a red variety, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the serving suggestion of the truly seasoned wino. Nevertheless, she’s keen to run with the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can easily influence her. It makes it much easier if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made eight times its budget by serving undercatered over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women variously shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. It touches 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 quite 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 getting out and snapping pictures of these shops and structures that have been just decimated. They’re no longer there!”

What makes them so haunting? “Because existence is haunting! 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, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the sidewalk is noticeable – Diane Keaton particularly. Does anyone 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 sneak into one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. My God, I’d be arrested because they’re locked up! You want me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You can use this: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got thrown in jail cause she tried enter old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is quite the architecture specialist. She’s made 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 evident in Italy. They’re more there with you. It’s just so different from things here. It’s not as driven.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of entryways and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. Oh, I love doors. Yes. In fact, I’m looking at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the exits and entrances, “the individuals who lived there or what they sold or why is it empty? It makes you think about all the facets that pretty much all of us experience. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not succeeding very well, but then, you know, something snuck in.

“It’s truly interesting that we’re alive, that we’re here, and that most of us who are lucky have cars, which take you all over the place. I love my car.”

What type does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m luxurious. I’m very upscale. It’s black. Yes. It’s quite nice though. I like 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, avoid that. Heavens, be careful. Look ahead. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Unique Persona

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing outtakes 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, creates a dramatic contrast with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most disarming today is how similar she seems from her screen self.

“I think the amount of similarity in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an actor,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. Her way of being in the world, her innate nature. She remains constantly in the moment, as a person and as an artist.”

One morning, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her study the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is genuinely fascinated. She has all of that texture in her being.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine fixtures. “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 self-deprecating. That sort of underplays it. “Perhaps she’d kill me for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a movie star. She’s just so in the moment of her experience and being that to ponder the larger … There is no time or space for it.”

Early Life

Keaton was born in an LA suburb in 1946, the first of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an estate agent, her mother won the local crown in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Watching her crowned on stage prompted a mix of pride and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and unfulfilled – shutterbug, collage artist, potter and journal keeper (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her parent as, for example, {starring|appearing