Anastasia

Lara

"She was someone that you just couldn't get enough of you know? She was a storyteller. She was a born entertainer. She loved seeing the light in people's eyes when they were happy. Even if she was going through a horrible time, she would still push herself to make people feel better. She would live and breath through other people's happiness." Lara was outside of Ana's old West Hollywood apartment. A cigarette lit in her left hand as she leaned over the balcony that had been the scene of most of the amazing memories she had shared with her late friend.

"Wherever she went, she could be counted upon to have with her these three things: hand lotion, an umbrella, and a book. The book was always one of three. Either A Streetcar Named Desire, Across the River and Into the Trees, or The Catcher in the Rye. While out walking, she would sit wherever she could and open the book, whichever title she had at the time, at random, and would read. "

"When she passed" she looked down from the balcony and then back at the camera, " all of us thought it was a bad joke from the public, like a publicity stunt. She had been in the middle of shooting a movie with Steven Spielberg, and everything seemed to be perfect. The very thought of her taking her own life while at the peak of her career seemed ridiculous to everyone." she sighed and took another drag of her thin cigarette. Lara, once young and full of never ending energy had a certain distance about her now. Now a mother, and a wife, and a full-time PR executive at Atlantic Records, she looked drained while talking about her best friend.

"I was with her through every aspect of her career, before and during the fame. She had a way of always staying humble, grounded. She always seemed happy, but that was the thing I guess, she just SEEMED."

"I remember one time, it was 1992." she laughed shaking her head and taking another puff of her bitch stick. " I came home from work, I had just moved to Manhattan at the time, and I found her sitting in front of my apartment with a bouquet of flowers. I was crazy to see her, it had been almost a month since the last time I saw her. I asked her what the flowers were for and she told me that WE had finally made it and that the flowers were for me. I asked her why and she told me everything that had happened and the role she had just gotten. You know, the role for The Age of Innocence, it blew up everywhere and she got an academy award nomination. She said that she got the role because of me. She was always an appreciative person, she would never take any one for granted, other than her self sometimes..." she smiled "She took me out for dinner and a movie and just celebrated the whole thing with me. She would say that nothing is worth celebrating if there was no one to celebrate it with."

"What were your views on her and Slash's relationship?"

Lara gave the camera a slightly sad smile and looked down at her hands "They completed each other. I've never seen a love so pure, so honest, no matter how dysfunctional it would get at times, you could see on his face that he would never be able to let her go. He lived and breathed for her, and she knew that. That's the one thing I never got about her death, if she had known how much she meant to him, how she could have left him alone...left all of us alone."

"How about her family?"

"She didn't talk to her parents that much. I remember when she was on the big screen for the first time her mom called her to ask if she had just seen a poster of her daughter in the local theater, Ana just told her 'Yeah' and hung up. They weren't ever really supportive of what she wanted to do and how she wanted to live her life."

"So they didn't talk?"

"Here and there yeah they would, I would call her folks most the time to tell them she was okay and how she was doing. They were really rough on her as a kid. A lot of psychological abuse was happening while she used to live with her parents. Her parents put her into rehab when she was 14 because they thought they she had ADHD. She did, but that's not how you go about handling that situation. They would constantly make her feel as if she was sick, or as if she had some type of problem."

"When did you meet her parents for the first time?"

"Christmas of 89'. They had taken a flight out to surprise her, little did they know they were the ones who were going to be surprised. She hadn't told them she dropped out and was living in some sketch apartment in West Hollywood. It was a whole shit storm. They were yelling at me, at her. I took it upon myself to be the barrier between them and her. They had a whole other problem with Slash, which to this day is still unresolved from their side."

"She was iconic for her time, and to this day still you can still see the influence she has amongst the new generation. Her and Slash were like a vintage dysfunctional rocker version of Romeo and Juliet. Even though Romeo didn't die in this version. She made sure that he didn't. He would have I believe if she hadn't left that note for him. She left everyone in her life a specific note. His was, I believe the most emotional out of all of them. I couldn't even finish reading it. I threw mine out. I couldn't stand the fact that it was a reality, I tried for the longest time to deny her death."

She finally stood up from leaning against the railing of the balcony, "Im glad this documentary is happening. I hope it gives some insight to the people that are watching and they understand that she wasn't just a tragic young death. She was much more than her death. She was her, unapologetically her. She was and will be an icon, not because of how she left us, but because of her spirit and undeniable talent."

"Thank you for your time."

"Thank you for finally making something that doesn't just romanticize her death."  She put out her third cigarette.