“She’s amazing live,” Michael Harte, the award-winning Irish director and editor of Kylie, Netflix’s new three-part documentary series, says after I tell him I flew to Lisbon for the singer’s Tension tour and that there couldn’t have been more joy in the arena. “Nick Cave puts it beautifully when he says Kylie is the definition of joy. We live in a bit of a cynical world, and beacons of hope are kind of hard to find, really, aren’t they?”Harte wanted to “emphasise Kylie’s joyfulness as much as possible” in the series. “You have to stay true to yourself and try to see the world, as hard as it is right now, in a positive way, otherwise what’s the point? And she has most certainly done that.” He was in Los Angeles when he got a call from John Battsek, a producer he worked with while editing the Netflix series Beckham.“He said to me: ‘I think you should come meet Kylie Minogue in the Chateau Marmont.’ No context. I was, like: ‘Okay.’ Who’s saying no?”Battsek was confident Harte was the right man to direct a Kylie documentary. But he had directed only once before – a true-crime film shot during Covid “when nobody could do anything properly”.“I was, like, ‘I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for me to make this. I’m not experienced enough. Kylie’s too iconic for this. You cannot drop the ball on this one.’ I thought, well, I’ll go anyway, and it’ll be a good story to tell my friends back in Donegal.”When Harte arrived the hotel bar was dark. “She walked in, and it was like Nick Cave describes her: she was like a beam of light. There was an energy about her that I was totally blown away by,” he says. “I remember thinking that if I could put that into a documentary, it’s going to be really special.”He was struck by Minogue’s sense of humour, authenticity and readiness to tell her story.Kylie Minogue looks back on her career in the Netflix documentary directed by Michael Harte. Photograph: Netflix “I told her I’m obsessive about looking through archive and watching every frame, and she thought that was funny, because she was, like, ‘you ain’t ready for my archive’, and she almost threw the gauntlet down.”Too much archive falls under the category of “nice problem to have”, but it does make the final cut more of a heartbreak.“Archive is our best friend. It certainly was on this, although it turned from my best friend to my enemy by the end of the project, because there was so much, and Kylie still sends me archive now, even though the project’s over.”The original plan was to make a feature, which was why Harte opted to both direct and edit.“I’m a bit obsessive about my workflow, shall we say, and I like to do everything, to a fault. But as I started going through it I knew there was no way we were going to get it into an hour and a half. It would do her a disservice. It would do the story a disservice.”A fortuitous loss of signal helped Harte work out how to structure it as a series.“I was driving through America, finishing off another project, and I was in the middle of nowhere with no phone reception, at the behest of my radio. INXS’s Need You Tonight came on, and it was like a light bulb. I knew that would be the end of episode one.“I thought of Kylie and Michael [Hutchence] walking out for the first time publicly, where she’s wearing the famous Xs and Os dress and her blond wig, and it’s December 1989. That felt like a good hook, as it’s the end of the decade.”Kylie’s much remarked-on gold hotpants from her return to dance-pop in 2000, after an underrated foray into more indie sounds, would close the 1990s-focused second episode.Initially, the idea was to include only Minogue’s audio narration, similar to the Wham! feature that Battsek’s company, Ventureland, had produced for Netflix.“The more I got to know Kylie the more I was, like, ‘she’s got to be on camera here’. She’s so energetic and fun, and because there were things she hasn’t spoken about before in this documentary, I was worried that if we did that only in audio we’re only getting half the story.”When it evolved into a three-part series, other voices were introduced: Jason Donovan, Pete Waterman, Dannii Minogue and Cave, all of whom prove to be excellent value without overshadowing the show’s star.Jason Donovan, Kylie Minogue and Dannii Minogue at the documentary launch. Photograph: John Phillips/Getty Images for Netflix “My rule was that Kylie has to be front and centre. She’s telling her story for the first time, and everyone else needs to feel like a supporting character,” Harte says.The camera-shy Katerina Jebb, a photographer and artist who has been a close friend since 1991, is also heard as Harte interviews Minogue in Jebb’s Paris apartment, while her spotlight-shunning parents, Carol and Ron, and cameraman brother, Brendan, appear alongside Kylie and Dannii in a touching family scene filmed in Melbourne.Harte was born in August 1982, which means he can recall when Minogue’s Stock Aitken Waterman-created single I Should Be So Lucky went to number one, in February 1988.“I remember watching Neighbours in Donegal, in Lifford, with my parents. It was like the Super Bowl in Ireland when the wedding happened. The whole country was watching. I remember Kylie and Jason – well, Scott and Charlene – having a fight in the show and being rattled for a week after.”That it was an age of tabloid surveillance, but not constant online documentation, is reflected in the way the two soap actors turned pop stars avoided confirming at the time that they were a real-life couple. The first episode sheds new light on their youthful relationship courtesy of a tense extract from a holiday video shot by Donovan. Harte says the project’s archive producer, Alex Black, “built up a good relationship with Jason’s team”, who provided the footage.Kylie Minogue has been in the charts for nearly 40 years. Photograph: Netflix “It speaks a lot to Kylie that everybody involved in her story were so willing to give anything we needed. Jason was the same. He gave us lots of archive and lots of his time too.”Harte uses apt lines from Neighbours to deftly illustrate Kylie’s 1980s story; a similar storytelling technique was deployed in Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, for which he won an Emmy for editing in 2024. The 1990s episode, meanwhile, has an Irish flavour, with newspaper headlines such as “Erotic Kylie upsets Irish mums” capturing one of the brief spells in a near 40-year pop career when Minogue fell out of favour with the mainstream media.Concentrating only on the successful times is a danger when making documentaries about artists, Harte says.“With Kylie, the more interesting parts of her story are when she was struggling with the creation of music and trying to figure that out. Weirdly, I found it very relatable, this idea of ‘I’m trying to make something work here, and it’s just not working, and maybe that’s because I’m not good enough’. There was a lot of that, and it’s important to show.”The “emotional peak” arrives in episode three, when we see Minogue return to the stage for the first time after her treatment for breast cancer. Harte then jumps forward about 13 years to the catharsis of her set at Glastonbury in 2019. (She had been due to headline before the diagnosis forced her to cancel dates.) “It’s a big, big jump, but emotionally that arc felt right,” he says.[ Christopher Cross at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre: Thrilling night shows that great pop is eternalOpens in new window ]Minogue reveals that she had a second cancer diagnosis in 2021 and that she “got through it, again”, this time without having to go public while it was all unfolding. “It’s a big deal for her to tell us this story. What she told us at the end of the series is a huge moment in her life. It was all about us just trusting each other,” Harte says. At one point he got rid of his notes and as much filming gear as possible, so they could just talk. “We banned the word ‘interview’ any time I was interviewing her. We’d call them chats. This was just chatting.”Like all the best pop documentaries, the series has a single key message: Kylie has always been herself – her tenacious, professional, durable, joyous self. “I don’t have anyone else’s voice. What I have is my voice,” she tells Harte.Kylie Minogue has always stayed true to herself. Photograph: John Phillips/Getty Images for Netflix Battsek calls him a genius in Netflix’s press materials. Is he a genius?“No,” he says, laughing. “What I would say is I’m an absolute workhorse. I used to think I was the hardest-working person I knew until I met Kylie. She’s on another level.”Harte, who lives in London and has two children under the age of five, can’t say anything about his next project, because he doesn’t know what it is yet. It’s the first time he has deliberately not lined up work – documentary work, that is.“There’s a garden that needs to be mowed, I’ve been told this morning, and all the bins need to be taken out.”So it’s not all glamour then?“No, no, definitely not.”