For a first-time feature director, heading up a high-profile documentary about one of pop music’s most iconic global stars sounds like an intimidating prospect — and for Michael Harte, a Donegal-born filmmaker, that intimidation almost led him to walk away from the project entirely.
When veteran producer John Battsek reached out to Harte with an invitation: the Australian pop legend Kylie Minogue would be in Los Angeles, and Battsek wanted Harte to join them for a meeting to discuss the documentary concept. Harte immediately questioned if he was the right fit for the role. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, I’m not experienced enough as a director,” Harte recalled his internal thought process telling the BBC’s Evening Extra radio programme. Still, he reasoned, turning down a chance to sit down with Minogue at the legendary Chateau Marmont hotel was impossible. “I’ll go anyway. I’m not going to turn down a drink in the Chateau Marmont with Kylie Minogue,” he thought.
That fateful meeting at the iconic Sunset Boulevard hotel in West Hollywood shifted Harte’s perspective completely in minutes. Describing the dim, moody dining space, Harte said Minogue walked into the room with an unmissable, magnetic energy. “It sounds cheesy to say, but she really was [like a beam of light]. There was an energy there that was intoxicating,” he said. In that moment, any doubt Harte had carried into the meeting melted away. “And then I thought, I do want to make this film. I am the right person to do it. I could tell there was an energy from her that I wanted to take and transfer onto film and if we can do that successfully, I think the film could be really special.”
The resulting project is KYLIE, a three-part documentary series coming to Netflix that tracks Minogue’s decades-long career, tracing her path from a teenage actor on the hit Australian soap opera Neighbours to one of pop music’s most enduring, beloved performers. This collaboration marks a reunion for Harte and Battsek, who previously worked together on the hit Netflix documentary about David Beckham. For Harte, this is only his second credit as a director — his first came during the COVID-19 pandemic — after building a reputation as a respected editor, most recently for the critically acclaimed Michael J. Fox documentary Still.
To craft a documentary that felt fresh and intimate, rather than just another recap of a celebrity’s career, Harte and his team made a deliberate choice to step away from the formal, structured sit-down interviews that are common in biographical documentaries. “We decided pretty early on that we’d call them chats,” Harte explained. “Kylie had been interviewed for decades, and we wanted this to feel different.”
Instead, the series is anchored by Minogue’s personal archive, with the casual conversations taking place in her home, surrounded by boxes of personal photographs, home video, and decades of career footage that brought old memories flooding back. One of the biggest creative challenges the team faced was sorting through the sheer volume of content Minogue had accumulated over her career: beyond her decades of music releases and tours, Minogue has also worked consistently as an actor, leaving the team with everything from Neighbours on-set footage to high-fashion shoot outtakes, decades of media coverage, and unheard home recordings to sift through.
For Harte, working through that massive archive offered a rare, intimate look at Minogue’s growth in real time. “I say to Kylie, it almost felt like the Truman Show. You watch somebody grow up on camera,” he said. “Because of that we’re not just invested in Kylie’s music or you know her as an artist you’re actually invested in her as a person.”
Above all, Harte said what stood out most to him through the months of working on the project was Minogue’s extraordinary resilience, particularly in the face of relentless public criticism that started when she rose to fame as a teenager. “Kylie was 19 when that happened to her. I’m 43, if I got criticism like that, I’m retiring in the morning,” he said. That quiet strength left a lasting impact on how Harte shaped the documentary, a observation from Minogue’s ex-boyfriend Jason Donovan that never made it into the final cut but anchored the series’ emotional core: “There’s real fire in her.”