Diane Keaton Discusses Existence’s Quirks: From Canine Companions to Luxury Vehicles

Even before her canine companion nearly passes away, my call with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There is a lag on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She desires to talk about entryways. Each response comes filled with caveats. It’s fun and stressful – and intelligent. She wants to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Now 77, the film industry’s most humble star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her character in the literary group films, the newest of which starts with her having difficulty 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 that bad or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We both talk, stop, talk over each other again, a car crash of chatter. Indeed, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any nicer sound than the star 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.” Once again, I’m not exactly sure what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

In any case, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a follow-up to the 2018 hit, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, quirky, fond of 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. “Perhaps ‘Leslie’. But it was by then the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the widowed Diane connects with the actor. In the sequel, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Expect big dinners, long sequences (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a surprisingly big part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

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

Actually, Keaton has launched a white blend and a red variety, but both are designed to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the serving suggestion of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s eager to run with the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘I hear Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can easily influence her. It makes it much easier if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Movie’s Focus

The first Book Club made 8x its budget by catering to undercatered over-60s who loved 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’s less integral to the plot. It touches about fatalism. “Nothing I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all deal with.” A cryptic silence. “And then, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

What about 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 – once more, a bit tangentially. “A habit most people avoid any more. And then exiting and snapping pictures of these stores and structures that have been largely destroyed. They’re no longer there!”

Why are they so haunting? “Because existence is unsettling! You hold 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 find it hard slightly to picture it. LA is not, ultimately, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the sidewalk is noticeable – Diane Keaton particularly. Do people ever ask what she is up to? “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 arrested because they’re secured! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You can use this: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got thrown in jail because she tried enter old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Building Aficionado

Actually, Keaton is a true architecture specialist. She’s made more money flipping houses for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a community through its city design, she says.: “I think they’re more evident in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s just so different from things here. It’s less frantic.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of doors and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. I adore doors. Yes. In fact, I’m looking at them right now.” She likes to imagine the comings and goings, “the individuals who lived there or what they offered or why is it vacant? It prompts reflection about all the facets that pretty much all of us go through. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not working out very well, but then, y’know, something snuck in.

“It’s truly interesting that we’re living, that we’re here, and that most of us who are fortunate have cars, which transport you all over the place. I adore my car.”

What type does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m luxurious. I’m really fancy. It’s black. Yeah. It’s pretty good though. I enjoy it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I like to do is observe, 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 begin gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to unused clips from the classic film 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, makes for a stark difference with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most disarming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.

“I think the degree of similarity in the comparison of Diane as a person and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is unique. Her way of being in the world, how she’s wired. She is constantly in the moment, as a person and as an actor.”

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

Keaton is generally described as modest. That somewhat underplays it. “Maybe she’d kill me 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 reflect on 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. Her father was an real estate broker, her mother earned the local crown in the Mrs America competition for skilled housewives. Seeing 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 – photographer, collagist, potter and journal keeper (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her writings, are as much about her parent as, for example, {starring|appearing