Kylie Minogue saved the biggest revelation in her new Netflix documentary series Kylie until the last moment, revealing in the final minutes of the three-part series that her breast cancer returned in 2021.
The confession comes in a postscript to the doco, after a title card telling viewers the star had “One More Thing” to share, and sees Kylie speak for the first time about her second bout of cancer while in the studio with one of her most trusted musical collaborators, Richard “Biff” Stannard.
One might assume it was a carefully stage-managed scene designed to end the documentary with a bang – but the series’ director has now revealed that he had absolutely no idea the news was coming.
“I had no clue. They talked about certain songs had certain meanings to them that the audience don’t know about,” director Michael Harte told the Irish Mail on Sunday.
In the scene, Stannard had said that he and Minogue had written many personal songs together, including some that the public don’t know the real meaning of.
It’s Minogue who then reveals that one such song, the 2023 track Story, was actually inspired by her private cancer diagnosis two years earlier.
She seemed to surprise even herself with the revelation, and notes that it must be news even to one of she and Stannard’s musical collaborators, present with them in the studio.
“There was, you know, one person, one of one of her colleagues in the recording studio, hadn’t heard it either on the day, because she (Kylie) says it in the documentary, she points and says, ‘You didn’t even know this’,” Harte revealed.
In fact, Harte confessed that he very nearly didn’t attend the recording session – which was ostensibly for Kylie to finish off some tracks for her latest Christmas album – because he thought he already had more than enough footage with which to finish the doco.
“I had got to a point in the project where Kylie had given us some amazing interviews, and I felt like we had a lot of depth in the film, and I had kind of structured a three-part series in the edit, and I thought we’re kind of done, and we’re pretty close to finished,” he said.
Then he received a text from Minogue asking him to come and “hang out” in the studio – but after two years of shooting and already over budget, he wasn’t convinced it was worth his time.
“When I got there, and as we were recording, I remember thinking, this is nice stuff. I’m not sure what we’ll use it for. And then the conversation (about her cancer) started,” he said.
Speaking about her second cancer diagnosis in the documentary, Minogue said she was a “shell of a person” at the time – and wanted many times to share the news with the world once she’d recovered and stepped back into the public eye.
“I really just wanted to say what happened so I can let go of it. I’d sit through interviews and every opportunity I thought, ‘now’s the time’, but I kept it to myself,” she said.
Elsewhere in the illuminating docuseries, Minogue opens up about her IVF journey, trying to fall pregnant before she underwent chemotherapy for her first cancer diagnosis back in 2005.
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