Diane Keaton Discusses Existence’s Quirks: From Canine Companions to Fancy Cars

Right before her canine companion nearly passes away, my call with the acclaimed actress is disorderly. There’s a delay on the line. Dialogue stops and starts like a milk float. I had sent questions but she didn’t review them. She desires to talk about doors. Each response comes filled with caveats. 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 humble star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her role in the literary group films, the newest of which starts with her having difficulty to speak via her computer to best friends played by Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s preferable when you avoid seeing me,” she says, “or see them, because it turns quite odd, you know? I suppose 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 Diane Keaton laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A brief silence. “I think 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

In any case, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 hit, Keaton once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, quirky, fond of men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We borrowed a bunch of ideas from her life,” says filmmaker 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 widowed Diane connects with Andy García. In the follow-up, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Expect big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo and a remarkably large 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? “Absolutely,” says Keaton gamely. “Around 6 in the morning I’ll have 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 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. Still, she’s eager to run with the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a big consumer 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 cost by serving undercatered over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its story 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 destiny. “Not something I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all deal with.” A gnomic pause. “And then, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

Regarding her character’s big speech about hanging on to youthful hopes? “I’m sort of addicted to getting in my car and cruising the streets of LA,” she says – once more, a bit off-topic. “A habit most people don’t do any more. And then exiting and photographing these shops and structures 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 not that at all! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I’m struggling slightly to visualize it. Los Angeles is not, after all, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your uppers. Anyone on the sidewalk is noticeable – the actress especially. Do people ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. My God, I’d be arrested because they’re secured! 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 because she tried enter old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is quite the architecture specialist. She has earned more money flipping houses for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a society through its urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more evident in Italy. They’re 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 shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Uh-huh. Actually, I’m gazing at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the exits and entrances, “the people who lived there or what they sold or why is it empty? 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 other one was not succeeding very well, but then, you know, something crept in.

“It’s truly interesting that we’re alive, that we’re here, and that the majority who are fortunate 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 very upscale. It’s black. Yes. It’s pretty good though. I enjoy it.”

Is she a speeder? “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. God, be careful. Look ahead. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Unique Persona

In case it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like hearing unused clips from Annie Hall sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her dislike to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and coloring, and anything more revealing than a turtleneck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her film co-stars. But most disarming today is how similar she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I think the amount of similarity in the comparison of Diane as a person and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. Her way of being in the world, her innate nature. She is constantly 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 understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains genuinely fascinated. She has all of that texture in her soul.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine fixtures. “A lot of people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” Somehow, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as modest. That sort of downplays 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 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 born in an LA suburb in 1946, the eldest of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an real estate broker, her mother earned the regional title in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Watching her crowned on stage evoked a blend of satisfaction and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and unfulfilled – photographer, 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