The first Christmas without Diane

Sarah Jessica Parker, Dermot Mulroney and others remember Oscar-winner Diane Keaton, who turned the set of ‘The Family Stone’ into something like home.

Scenes from “The Family Stone.” “The Family Stone” / Red Carpet Productions/20th Century Fox/Disney

Diane Keaton was already an Oscar-winning actress and comedy powerhouse when she arrived at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet a director with just one indie film under his belt.

“Diane Keaton walks in with a bowler hat,” writer-director Thomas Bezucha said, recalling how stunned he was that the star was coming for lunch with him. But Keaton had read his script for “The Family Stone,” then making the rounds under the working title “F**cking Hate Her,” and she was intrigued.

“She took a real leap of faith,” he said. “You feel lucky when you see a shooting star, and I feel like I got hit by a comet.”

Keaton’s signing on opened the floodgates to a cast that has helped “The Family Stone” become a Christmas classic, a sometimes cringey, other times cozy, often rewatched movie that turns 20 years old next week. In it, Keaton plays Sybil Stone, a stormy matriarch who lords over her New England family as her prized son Everett (played by Dermot Mulroney, who called the character “one of the all-time mama’s boys in cinema history”) brings his extremely uptight and ultimately mismatched girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) home for the holidays.

Thomas Bezucha, Diane Keaton on set for “The Family Stone” in 2005.
20th Century Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock

The movie balances the festive, chaotic shenanigans of their holiday visit with the far more sobering knowledge — revealed slowly to the viewer throughout, just as it dawns on her family members — that this is Sybil’s last Christmas.

Now, the cast and crew of “The Family Stone” — just like viewers around the world who watch this occasionally infuriating holiday staple every year — are balancing their joyous memories of the film with the sad fact that this is the first holiday season without Keaton, who died unexpectedly at 79 in October.

‘She was mom’

When it came to the question of who should play Sybil, Bezucha said, “Diane Keaton is the answer, but she’s the answer to every question.”

She was “top of the list,” he added, but “not for all the obvious reasons.”

“It wasn’t for the comedy which she’s famous for,” he said of the Hollywood legend, who had won Oscar gold for 1977’s “Annie Hall” and scored big with other comedies like “The First Wives Club,” “Baby Boom” and “The Father of the Bride” franchise. It was her dramatic work in early ‘80s films like “Shoot the Moon” and “Reds,” the latter of which earned Keaton another of her Oscar nominations, that moved Bezucha.

Producer Michael London recalled that Keaton felt “so connected” to Sybil after reading the script. “At other points of her career, this is not a movie that I imagine she would have jumped at, but it was the perfect moment, and she was the perfect actress.”

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With Keaton committed, the rest of the cast “fell in place so quickly because she was the dream of who that character would be,” London said. That cast included Luke Wilson, Claire Danes and Rachel McAdams, who was just coming off of both “Mean Girls” and “The Notebook.”

Once on set, “Diane was the mom to everybody,” London added.

“She just brought so much feeling to the role and the way the movie came together, it was really — we all lived in that house for two months, and she was mom.”

‘A merciless tease’

If moms are often the leaders of their families, Keaton was certainly that on set.

For Parker, both light-hearted and tougher scenes with Keaton were “inspired and instructive” opportunities to “watch her work and to see how she puts it all together.”

One of those “harder scenes” was a gathering on Christmas morning in which Meredith gives a touching Christmas gift to each member of the Stone family, finally bridging the growing rift between her and Keaton’s Sybil.

The gift scene in “The Family Stone” / Red Carpet Productions/20th Century Fox/Disney

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“In theory, it was scary. I was very nervous about it,” Parker recalled. “I did feel like she was a real combatant, like we were in proper swordplay, and that I had to be both capable of that but also not win.”

Parker said that their exchange turned out successfully because Keaton was her guide.

“Really just listening to Diane and responding, given the story, was my best approach, and I loved it.”

Keaton also brought her famously quirky habits and deep inquisitiveness to set.

Sarah Jessica Parker, Diane Keaton and writer-director Thomas Bezucha at “The Family Stone” premiere in Los Angeles on December 6, 2005.
Alberto Rodriguez/BEI/Shutterstock

“She liked asking very personal questions,” Parker noted. In rehearsals, she would ask Parker about “everything from money to, like, really funny, provocative” topics, often leaving her moved to “involuntarily answer.”

These were “typically not questions that somebody would ask another person,” she added, but she knew Keaton’s end goal was never to interrogate; it was to understand.

“I think it was simply because she was so interested in people,” Parker said. “She loved knowing odd facts about people and, I guess, what makes a person an individual was very interesting to her.”

Keaton was certainly an individual herself. “She was the first person I ever saw put ice cubes into a Pinot Noir,” Parker recalled. “Now everybody puts their Pinot Noir in the fridge. So of course, typically as usual, she knew something before everybody else.”

(from left) Craig T. Nelson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ty Giordano, Savannah Stehlin, Elizabeth Reaser, Dermot Mulroney, Rachel McAdams, Diane Keaton, Brian White in “The Family Stone.”
Moviestore/Shutterstock

Bezucha remembers Keaton as a “merciless tease,” and recalled an anecdote in which Wilson chipped a tooth while filming, and when he asked Keaton for a dentist recommendation, she gave him the number to a psychiatrist.

Keaton was apt to buy lotto scratchers — or wine — every week for the entire crew. London said she gave a corkscrew wine opener as a gift to every member of the cast and crew. “It was this beautiful, very elegant, the most gorgeous wine opener I’d ever seen in my life.”

She was also generous with her praise. Mulroney recalled filming the heartbreaking moment when Sybil reveals to his character that she is sick – a snippet that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences used on Instagram as a tribute to Keaton at the time of her death.

The Kitchen scene in “The Family Stone” / Red Carpet Productions/20th Century Fox/Disney

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“In the kitchen, we were so close and respectful and quiet with each other while we were shooting it,” Mulroney told CNN. “At the end of that day, she said something to me that has motivated me since, meant so much to me, and I think of often. She said she’d never seen anything like that before.”

‘Everybody was in tears’

Keaton’s generosity and playfulness were tempered by her laser-focused ability to drop into the emotion of a scene, which in many ways gives “The Family Stone” its sentimental, tragic heart.

“The entire film was kind of, I would say, a hidden goodbye,” Craig T. Nelson, who plays Sybil’s slightly more even-keeled spouse Kelly, said. He recalled filming the scene in which Sybil tells her husband that she’s scared about her health diagnosis, and bares scars on her chest from surgery. He worried it would be a hard scene to land, before filming it with the sure Keaton.

“I just remember being with her and thinking how remarkable I thought she was in the scene, and how well she had prepared,” he said. She had an ability to “immerse” herself in those harder scenes, he said, and emerge on the other side with a result that was “not only tender, but real.”

Moments like this — when “The Family Stone” shifts from breezy and awkward family comedy into something altogether different — are peppered throughout, becoming fuel that powers the emotional rollercoaster that keeps many viewers coming back to it each holiday season.

“The Family Stone” / Red Carpet Productions/20th Century Fox/Disney

In another scene, Sybil’s pregnant daughter Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser) goes up to her mom’s room while she’s napping and lies down beside her. Hesitantly, she places a hand on her shoulder, waking her from a light sleep. Sybil turns to face Susannah and touches her daughter’s face before asking, “Who else knows?”

“Diane was crying, Elizabeth was crying,” Bezucha said. “And then I walked out of the room and the crew… just everybody was in tears.”

Season’s feelings

“The Family Stone” was released days before Christmas in 2005, garnering mixed reaction – an early sign of the divisiveness and even fury it has caused in the ensuing two decades. But that and its box office take, which was an impressive $93 million against an $18 million budget, has little, if anything, to do with the movie’s lasting power.

CNN previously reported exclusively that a sequel, in the works prior to Keaton’s death, is being written by Bezucha (with the working title “The Families Stone,” according to London). Bezucha said Keaton’s death was “a blow on a tender bruise already,” as he’s been immersed in the loss of Sybil while writing.

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That compounded loss will be something felt by many this season. Just before the movie jumps from one Christmas to the next, we see Keaton as Sybil watching the snow out the window, before we leave her and arrive at the next Christmas, the one without her.

Mulroney remembers rewatching the film with his mother three years ago after his father Michael passed away, and how “it really crept up on both of us.”

“Obviously, I was prepared, but gosh, I don’t know if I’ve had another movie rebound into my own life in that same fashion,” Mulroney said, his eyes watering.

“And now my mom’s gone too, and now Diane’s gone, who played my mom, so it’s super close to those of us who had that golden moment with her. It’s super close to our skin.”