No, Annie Hall was not the Diane Keaton story. Woody Allen may have based much of the title character on his long-time leading lady on film and in life -- her scattershot speech patterns, for instance, and eclectic sense of style. And Keaton, who won an Academy Award for the groundbreaking, 1977 comedy, was indeed born with the name Diane Hall.
But the real Keaton story would be about a much more intricate, contradictory person. At 56, the L.A.-raised, New York-identified Keaton can still talk in blithe, aimless Annie-speak -- but she can also zero in on specific points with eloquent lucidity. A strong believer in accepting one's age and being true to oneself, she's also a recent, first-time adoptive mother, and refuses to remove long, black gloves throughout a full day of interviews at a posh, Beverly Hills hotel.
And even though she giddily talks about keeping the set of Hanging Up, the new movie she directed and co-starred in, a creatively loose, borderline chaotic environment, there's little doubt that Georgia, the exaggeratedly ambitious and self-possessed magazine editor she portrays in the sentimental comedy, displays a side of the real Keaton as surely as flighty Annie did.
"I go into these meetings with her and studio executives or other producers, and they're all excited and thinking, 'Great, Diane Keaton, she'll be funny and charming and she's kind of famous, we can use her name and then push her around,' " says Bill Robinson, an eight-year professional associate and co-founder of Keaton's Blue Relief production company. "I just think, if you guys only knew what you were in for . . . 'cause she comes out swingin'. When she works on a movie, especially as a director, it's very personal to her. And she's smart as hell, she has her opinions and she sticks by them. It's often a surprise for people, I think."
She has always been that way. After all, when the Neighborhood Playhouse-trained Keaton got her first big break, in the original Broadway cast of the taboo-breaking hippie musical Hair, she was the only actress who refused to appear naked on stage.
Although best known for her seventies Allen comedies, the Godfather films' perpetually appalled Kay Corleone, her Oscar-nominated turn as Reds' early-century radical Louise Bryant and her commercial comebacks in the broad First Wives Club and Father of the Bride comedies, Keaton has gradually built a respectable directing résumé over the past dozen years. The quirky documentary Heaven was followed by music videos, episodes of the TV series Twin Peaks and China Beach, the award-winning telefilm Wildflower and the widely acclaimed, 1995 family drama Unstrung Heroes.
Hanging Up is about unstrung relations, too, this time among three busy sisters (Keaton, Meg Ryan and Friends' Lisa Kudrow) and their perpetually troublesome, dying father (Walter Matthau). Based on Delia Ephron's semi-autobiographical novel, it's the first film Keaton has directed as well as acted in. She'll try to tell you it was sheer lunacy.
"It feels like mass chaos when I try to direct myself," Keaton says. "I'm not a very technical actress, I just sort of have to be with the other actors. Therefore, I just did a lot of takes of my scenes, hoping that the editor would save me later. Which she did, but she had a hard time because nothing matched and. . . . Oh, it was a nightmare! Plus, I'm sure all the other actors were wondering why I got so many more takes than they did. It was just to save myself."
Pressed further, Keaton admits that there actually was a strong design plan for shooting the movie.
"I really like the moving camera, and in this particular movie, I had a Charlie's Angels theme in my mind," she explains. "Whenever the three sisters were together, I tried to keep it, as much as I could, in a three-shot at all times. I just wanted to get that sense of what it's like, being one of three sisters myself. And I looked at a lot of movies where people did flashbacks for the memory scenes; a lot of influences went into this."
For Ryan, working with Keaton was an exercise in subtle, almost imperceptible manipulation.
"When she thought something could be different or better, Diane would go, 'Yeah, mm-hmm, ah . . . okay, let's do it again,' " Ryan recalls. "We didn't have one second of rehearsal, not before the movie or when we were doing it. What I felt like, when I got to work, was she had set up an obstacle course and I was going to have to fill it in, even though she planned things out very well. She wanted to see what everybody brought to it; it felt liberating because of that."
Keaton herself attributes the freedom to pursue her varied creative interests -- she's also an acclaimed photographer and has edited several books of her own and other pictures -- to her acting success.
"You know, I have these impulses," she explains, tentatively. "It's something that I've had all my life, where I wanted to try things and do things. I've been fortunate in that I got to, first of all, be an actress, and by being that, other opportunities came my way. I didn't really define it, like saying 'gee, I want to be a director' or whatever, but I was drawn toward it, I had the opportunity and I took it."
But that was well past the age when most people take up a filmmaking career. Keaton admits that, adventurous as she is in some respects, in many aspects of life she's been a late developer -- really late, but better late than never, she acknowledges. Never married -- though she's had several long-term, high-profile relationships with the likes of Allen, Warren Beatty and her Godfather co-star Al Pacino -- Keaton has only discovered the joys of parenting, via her daughter Dexter, in the last four years.
"It's been wonderful, it's been everything, it's really great," she says, momentarily Annie-struck by the marvel of it all. "Yeah, yeah. It's really the basis of everything."
On the other end of the age spectrum, Keaton as director faced a potentially serious problem when her 78-year-old male lead contracted a severe case of pneumonia in the late phase of Hanging Up's production last year. Matthau was hospitalized for several months, and ended up recording additional dialogue from his bed. The legendary comic actor is home now and doing pretty well according to Keaton, a devoted admirer who keeps in touch.
"I do love Walter," she says. "He is my role model now, in life, because he's lived it his way, because he's his own person in a world where most people fall in the line of fire in that particular department. He has stayed an original his whole entire life and has never made an alteration on that beautiful face of his."
The latter is a point of honour, in Keaton's view. In facelift-happy Hollywood, she has rather impressively succeeded in remaining glamorous while eschewing the cult of cosmetic surgery.
"It's a brave thing to do, and I think you've got to earn your stripes," she says. "The other route is seductive, of course; look better, be younger, look fresh. But to me, that makes you lose one tiny little bit of the ability to say, 'I'm me, this is what I am.' I'm sorry if it isn't as . . . refreshed as it should be, but this is the route I'm going. It's a more difficult route in a way, but in another way it has more integrity."
And you can joke about it, too. Asked where she sees her movie career heading, Keaton laughs.
"I see that, in about 10 years, I'll be playing the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz," she says. "I feel like that's where I'm going, if I'm lucky. I would love to play that, by the way; green and black are my favourite colours! But I really feel that, as you get older, you're either considered the sweet one or the evil one. I seem to be going in the evil direction."
What about her next film, the long-in-the-making Warren Beatty romantic comedy Town and Country?
"Oh, in that movie I play the nice wife," Keaton says, smiling and confident that she can never really be pigeonholed. "See, I did have the opportunity to be kind and good again."
One more time.