Love, sex, and friendship according to Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen

Los Angeles — When four amazing women get together, expect a riot!

We sat down separately with Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen and it was a joy to get their candid insights on almost any topic you can think of.

The four talented and lovely ladies portray lifelong friends who are members of a book club. Their lives change when they start reading the infamous “Fifty Shades of Grey”  in the romantic comedy, “Book Club.” The Bill Holderman-helmed film also stars Andy Garcia, Don Johnson, Richard Dreyfuss and Craig T. Nelson.

Below are excerpts of our conversations with them:

Jane Fonda (“Vivian”)

All photos courtesy of Paramount Pictures

On working with Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen:

When you go into a movie like this, you worry that there’s going to be one or two or more divas, because actors can be very difficult. It’s a pain in the ass if you’ve got somebody working with you that’s a diva. It was such a joy to discover none of them were. We all were just regular folks. We loved hanging out together. When the shots were over, we’d go to the garage that was our green room. We’d spend time together in the garage. We just learned so much about each other. It was really fun.

On geriatric sex:

Older women are the fastest growing demographic in the world. We live on average five years longer than men. So the marketplace (cinema and television are part of the marketplace) is beginning to realize this is an important market for us. Then there’s the women’s movement, the #TimesUp movement, the #MeToo movement. There’s a lot going on in the zeitgeist that is encouraging us to think about the fact that women’s narratives have been left out of the equation. That’s bad for men and women, if half the story isn’t being told then we’re all missing out.

We’re going to see that more and more. It will include older women having sex because a lot of older women do. I wrote a book about it. It wasn’t just about sex. It was about ageing but there were chapters on sex. I interviewed people well into their '90s, actually a couple older than 100.

Sex is different (when you are older). I can talk about this because I’m 80. When you’re older, sex is different especially when the man is also older. Young people have to know that you’ve got to learn about the body, what’s changing, what you have to do differently. You lose certain things like spontaneity. It’s not so easy to say let’s just jump in the bed and do it because there are pills and shots. There are other things that have to go on. But that can also be made very erotic and sexy, the plan. You have to plan things out. But for women, it can be much better because we know our bodies better. We’re not as afraid to ask for what we want. So sex when you’re older can be better for women.

On imagining all her girlfriends in her living room:

Everybody’s drinking. Mary’s drinking tequila. I’m drinking vodka. Diane is drinking red wine on ice; the French, please forgive her, and Candy is drinking divine white wine probably. I have other friends who are sober. Depending on who the friends are, we’ll be talking about usually politics, usually activism. The women in the movie with me - Candy, Diane and Mary - are new friends so when we get together we’re still getting to know each other. There’s so much we still don’t know.

I still have to talk to Candy about (French film director) Louis Malle, find out all about that. But my older friends, all my friends are younger than me, the ones that I’ve known longer are all activists. We usually talk what we’re doing, where are we organizing, where are we putting our energy. But the best part is there’s a particular laughter when women friends get together that comes from really deep, and it’s cleansing. It does something to your brain that it doesn’t ever happen anywhere else. You can laugh with men but it’s not the same. It’s just not the same.

On having a lover at the moment

Do I have a lover right now? No I don’t, not for a year. I think I’m done. I’m 80, thank you.

Diane Keaton (“Diane”)

On a book that changed her life:

In terms of love? Nothing in the area of a male/female, but family. I remember what made me love my family more was “The Diary of Anne Frank.” I will never get over it and how tragic it was, how united they were, how they lived and how they lost each other. It made me very sad and it made me appreciate my own mother and father.  That, for me, defined love, on the edge of loss.

On finding your own voice:

For me, it goes back to my family and that’s my mother in this particular case. My mother is somebody who always had big dreams and never the opportunity.  She always instilled in me to be confident because I was insecure. So my mother said you can use that too; it’s okay to be insecure and it’s okay to not know for sure. Just carry on and pursue your goals and you are going to be fine. I am who I am because of her.

I always think of my mother. I think if she was born when I was born, she would have had the life that she would have enjoyed by pursuing her goals. She was a mother of four. I was born in 1946 and she was a fabulous woman. She was Mrs. Los Angeles when there was a Mrs. Los Angeles. I remember being a little girl at home in Highland Park where we lived.

I must have been seven when all these people came into our house in the morning. All of these men and women came into the house and they were looking at our house because you had to show that you were a good housekeeper, that your house was really nice, what your specialty was and mom’s was making a cake. She worked forever on this cake over and over and over. I remember that she had ambition, but she didn’t have the opportunity to follow her dream. She instilled that in me again and I loved her very much.

On 70 being the new 40:

No, I don’t believe it is, no. I believe it’s 70.  There are many interesting things about it, and things that you don’t notice when you are younger, for example, nature.  I really am taken to getting in my car and driving on the road, much more than ever before. Seeing the world and seeing California, which is one of my favorite places, and Nevada and Arizona and just the West, and just simply taking it in more, because it’s so magical. You just can’t really know what is going to touch you more as you move along and that is what it’s been like for me. I know it’s not exactly interesting, but it is.

On Hollywood changing:

For me, the most important thing revolving around that is really equal pay. That is what interests me. Because I do feel that women aren’t really paid as fair as men. That is going to change.

On what she discovered about herself when she wrote her two memoirs:

What I found out about myself was that I was much more driven than I told myself I was. Because I constantly was pursuing goals and I realize I missed out on things because of my being goal-driven. I could have sat back and enjoyed smaller moments more often, moments of intimacy and just sharing time with the person, my mother, especially my mother, who gave me so much; and also my siblings and my sister and my brother. So I learned that you have to sometimes let go of your goal-driven self, because I really enjoy my hobbies, acting and being part of this community. But maybe a little too much.

On her next book:

My next book is about my brother, my poor brother. He is probably going to shoot me. He is a very interesting character, Randy, and I am two years older than him. I was the first-born. You know what that means. The worst.

Candice Bergen (“Sharon”)

On rare female roles:

Much less old actresses working with each other, let’s be frank. I don’t know how they got this movie made. The studio didn’t want to go with older actresses. They wanted younger, vibrant actresses but there’s nobody more vibrant than us, frankly. I’m very sad that today’s one of the last days of our long publicity tour because I’m going to miss these women. We’ve all agreed that we have to keep the friendship going and keep that alive.

On what they do in between takes:

We shot mostly in a house in Brentwood and the garage was our green room. Every time we’d have downtime, we’d go in the garage and all of our chairs were set up there in a circle. We would just yak. We would just yak and yak and yak, just about everything. It was fascinating especially anything Jane had to say was pretty interesting.

On their topics of discussion:

Politics. Politics and doctors appointments. My birthday is Wednesday and I can’t even believe I actually passed the 70 mark. I’m just, how did this happen? It’s so shocking. So we don’t talk about fashion. We’re a little more substantial than that.

On her daughter with the late French film director Louis Malle, Chloe Malle:

We live across the Central Park from each other. She lives in my old apartment where she was born. She has been an editor at Vogue Magazine. She was the social editor for five years. Then she cut down from that so now she’s just a contributing editor at Vogue because she took time off to write a novel. So she’s written a novel and now she’s editing, making changes to the novel and shepherding its progress. She speaks beautiful French incidentally. I was just in Paris with her for her late father’s retrospective of his movie. I said honey your French is excellent.

On her chemistry with Richard Dreyfuss:

I suggested to director-writer Bill Holderman and writer Erin Simms that they cast Richard because I saw him a few weeks before we started shooting, at an event honoring Diane Keaton. I thought, huh, he’s Richard Dreyfuss. He’s so alive. He’s so intelligent and he’s a great actor. Why not cast him? We did and he was wonderful in the movie and really fun to work with.

On the women who had a strong impact on her life:

I spent a week in 1973 in Gombe, Africa with Jane Goodall at her camp. Jane Goodall had published a book then and she was a heroine of mine. I couldn’t get access to her camp so I convinced a woman’s magazine to send me there and send her money. If they hadn’t given her a check, I never would have gotten in. So they sent her a check for $10,000 toward her research camp and I spent a week there.

You stayed in a little hut with a cage door to keep the baboons out, and to empty your shoes for scorpions in the morning when you would put them on. It was very hardcore. Jane Goodall wouldn’t have been interested to be a primatologist if I hadn’t done this. She had such a singular focus and she hasn’t stopped incidentally, to this day.

I knew the author Lillian Hellman a little bit. She was very impressive.

I frankly find Jane Fonda remarkable. She is whip intelligent, just so intelligent. She notices everything. She would be a great double agent because she just misses nothing. She cares about people. We were taking the photograph, the four of us, and she took the iPhone and she corrected it. She retouched it so that everybody looked their best. I thought, thank you.

On ageing and beauty:

My parents were very smart with me and never focused on my looks. I have, as a result of the way they brought me up, very little vanity, for a woman. On the set, I never ask to see a mirror. I just have make-up and hair people who I trust and I just never look back. But certainly, I look older and I haven’t had a facelift. I had plastic surgery. I had my eyes done when I was 41. But I haven’t done excessive stuff because I don’t really believe in it. As you get older, you should look older. I’m with a lot of friends who are my age and I look like their grandmother. In a way, it’s a little depressing but I also look like a version of me. You shouldn’t travel too far afield.

Mary Steenburgen ("Carol")

On talking about sex with her co-stars:

We are fairly relaxed about it. Whenever I talk about my sex life, I am really talking about another person who everybody is very familiar with, so I probably don’t over share, which I am pretty sure both my husband and my children would be appreciate of. But the book was an amazing catalyst in the movie for asking women to look at not only what they have, but what they don’t have. It wasn’t necessarily that they don’t have sex, it’s do you have love and do you have romance and are you afraid and are you brave?

Of all this, how do you go through life with friends and be honest, share and take advice? There’s a moment where I give Jane some brutal advice. I lay it out for her and she says she is so brave, but she is terrified of intimacy. That’s the kind of thing that, somebody has to be a pretty good friend to say that to you and have you hear it. So for us, all these things were important.

But the sensuality, to see four women, even thinking about being sensual beings on screen at our age, is really unheard of. It just doesn’t happen. First of all, it doesn’t happen that anyone makes movies about four women over the age of 65 and then that we are fully, actualized human beings and not just somebody’s weird aunt. So we knew it was important to be brave about that.

On how she would describe herself:

I would say that I am 65 years old, and that I am probably the most secure in myself that I have ever been. That I have always been a shy person in my own way, but that I am taking this moment in time to work on that and steer a little of that down. I don’t want to end my life quite as shy as I have been.

I am filled with gratitude, and I did not expect to be working this much at age 65, not just this movie, but I do a television show “Last Man on Earth” which I cherish and have had the best time with my cast mates on that show. I just didn’t expect the richness of this time. So the fact that I got to make a movie that reflects that, is very important to me.

On her marriage to Ted Danson:

My marriage and my children are really the amazing blessings in my life. Ted Danson is an inspiration to me. He is my hero, he is my environmental hero. In a town where people can adopt a cause and then it’s gone two years later, Ted has been doing this work for 40 years, since way before there was such a term as global warming. He was doing that work. So I am proud of who he is in terms of that and as a dad and a stepdad and just a partner in life. So that’s incredible to be able to say that about somebody whom you have been with since 1993, which in actor years, means 287 years. So that’s pretty lucky.

Then where I am at, I am still a seeker. I still am learning. I still am falling down. I still make mistakes and have to figure things out, but I do love this moment in time and I wouldn’t go back. I used to be so good at swimming laps back then and now it’s so much harder than it used to be. Whatever it is, that reminds you that you are older. But the truth is, I wouldn’t go back. I like this time. It feels like I don’t worry about all the crap I used to worry about.

On how she spices up her marriage:

That’s probably way more than anybody needs to hear. It’s been spicy for a very long time.

On being the youngest at 65, of the four actresses:

I am the baby.  Which by the way is so rare for me, because on “Last Man on Earth,” I am not only the oldest person in the cast, I am the oldest person on the crew.  So it’s pretty weird.

On what she learned from the women:

I was knocked out by them. They are so much more incredible than I ever thought that they might be. They were three titans to me in this business. You heard about the garage that we would go to for a green room and the stories in there were so moving, funny, sexy, wild and hilarious. There was so much laughter on this set and there wasn’t a competition. There wasn’t a cattiness and everyone was on time. Nobody was insecure about their part and part of that is Bill Holderman really wrote four different women who have four different storylines and are going through four very different things. That was meaningful.

But for me, working with these three women was like a reward for surviving this business for a very long time, because I made my very first movie in 1977. I was 24. Then 41 years in the business and then I am given this beautiful gift.

On how she stays in shape:

I was in the pool this morning before I came here and I actually do love to be in water.  So I used to swim competitively. I swam with master swimming for a number of years and discovered that I actually love competing at the 50 and 100 meter breaststroke.  But I don’t do that anymore. But I do workout in pools almost every day and I go on hikes with my dog. I call it the Mary Steenburgen’s weird pool exercises that I have made up and seem to work for me. — LA, GMA News