'I'm blown away by her': The Irish man who made a Netflix series with Kylie

Donegal filmmaker Michael Harte had previously worked on the Beckham show, but even that didn't fully prepare him for the special experience of his interactions with Kylie Minogue, writes Esther McCarthy

Thu, 28 May, 2026 - 21:00

It was the emotional and powerful reveal that endeared her to millions of fans as she spoke for the first time about her second cancer diagnosis. In the final moments of her new documentary series for Netflix, Kylie Minogue tells how she had a second cancer diagnosis in 2021, having received successful treatment for breast cancer in 2005.

Now, the Irish filmmaker who worked closely with Minogue on the series for two years has told how he knew nothing about the star’s second cancer diagnosis until she chose to speak about it towards the end of filming.

Michael Harte says he had no idea she was about to share the news until she did so on camera. “I think that moment probably is a symbol of the relationship we had developed over two years. She felt comfortable to tell me that, and she didn't have to,” says the Co Donegal filmmaker, who directed and edited the three-part documentary series, Kylie.

“The truth is, we had finished the film at that point. I edited it as well and I was at a point where I thought we had a finished film, and it was the perfect three-act structure,” says Harte.

Towards the end of production, he got a call from the Australian artist, asking him to come and hang out at the recording studio where she was recording her forthcoming Christmas album. “I never knew any of this, and then she told me, as you see in the film. She mentioned it to everyone there, and some of them knew, some of them didn't.

Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue in their Neighbours' days.

"I think she not only trusted me to tell me, she trusted me to use it in the right way, and to treat it with as much respect as it deserved, because that scene deserves the utmost respect from a filmmaker, and from the audience too. She hadn't seen the edit at that point, she had no idea what I was making, which is even more remarkable. She was giving me something that I was putting into a film that she had no idea what it was.”

It is perhaps a testament to the two-year collaboration between Minogue and the filmmaker from Letterkenny, who was adamant that the globally celebrated artist be given ownership of her story throughout the process. It was important, he says, that Minogue owned her narrative in the series, which portrays how she was catapulted into fame, first through Neighbours and then through her first major hits in 1987, when she was still in her teens.

Having originally conceived that the series would be a feature documentary, Harte says he later opted for a three-act structure in series form. “I thought, what if we split the series into three parts? The 80s, the 90s, and the noughties,” he says. That structure was solidified when, while driving in the US, he was listening to the radio.

Need You Tonight by INXS, sung by Michael Hutchence (with whom Minogue had a two-year relationship and a painful break-up) came on the radio.

“As soon as I heard it, I thought: ‘That’s the end of episode one’. When I looked at the point when he released that song, I imagined Kylie and Michael going public and that famous shot of him walking through the premiere when she's in the X and O's costume.

"It was 1989, it was December, and I thought: ‘What happens at the end of 1999?’ and it was basically the hot pants. Those two defining moments in her life are kind of perfect for end-of episodes, but also the end of decades.”

Harte has become a sought-after documentarian following a number of successful projects. With a background in film editing, he won an editing Emmy for his work on Still: A Michael J Fox Movie. Other projects have included the award-winning Three Identical Strangers, while he was also editor on the David Beckham documentary series, Beckham. “I'm a Liverpool fan, and he only found that out after we'd done the project,” he laughs.

Growing up in Gaelic football-mad Donegal but not being good at the sport partly fostered his interest in film.

“I used to watch movies all the time — that was my film education. I went to Dublin City University and studied Communications there, and worked in Dublin with Bob Caldwell. He's a very well-regarded editor. I worked with him for a few years, and the truth is I didn't take it that seriously initially. It was just some fun thing I did.”

That all changed when he watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s celebrated 1998 drama Boogie Nights for the first time, and started to wonder about the possibilities his own career could bring. “I was completely blown away by it, and I'll never forget watching it, and as soon as I saw it, I was like: ‘I need to focus. I want to take this seriously now’.”

Harte met his wife and moved to London not long after that as he started building a filmmaking career. He leaned into his background as an editor when it came to researching and collating the massive amount of footage, photography and other source material in telling the story of one of the most famous and celebrated women in the world.

“There was so much material. She's a musician, an actor, she's a fashion icon. So there's all the photography that goes with that. Her brother was a cameraman so he followed her around for years. Kylie always kept a camcorder just for fun as well. She loves shooting, and then all the media that goes with that, and the newspaper cuttings.”

Researching through the decades of material, he says, he used to feel it was a bit like the Truman Show, because Minogue had essentially been on camera since she'd been born. “Somebody was always filming it, either her dad or her brother, to today. And her story still, it's not like we're at the end — she was creating number one hits as we were filming.”

Story, many filmmakers will tell you, is everything, and it was Minogue’s that first got Harte to board the project. “By the end of the project, it was her character, it was who she was. But I didn't know who she was initially. I knew Kylie Minogue the artist and the singer and the actor, but I didn't know Kylie the person.

"I got to know her over the last two years, and I'm kind of blown away by her. I've worked on a number of films with people, celebrities, however you want to define them. But I always say, if there's no story there, I can't figure this out. I don't know how to tell that story.

"Other people can, but my primary attraction to any of this is the story, and she has one of the most remarkable stories I've ever come across.”