Art & Creativity Quote by Christopher Plummer

Plummer isn’t selling nostalgia so much as staking a claim over an endangered version of Montreal: not the brand-friendly “city of festivals,” but the lived-in, half-mythic place that existed before it got smoothed into postcards. The key move is his insistence on “paint” and “fantastic,” a double entendre that flatters the city while admitting to artifice. He’s not promising documentary truth; he’s arguing that imagination is the only honest tool left when collective memory has been bulldozed by development, tourism, and the selective amnesia of progress.

“Nobody knows today what it was like” carries a quiet accusation. It’s aimed less at outsiders than at the present itself, which has overwritten the texture of streets, accents, and social rules so thoroughly that even locals can’t recover them without mediation. Plummer positions himself as that mediation: a performer whose job is to conjure worlds, now using the same craft to resurrect one.

Then comes the gut punch: “one of the last survivors.” The line shifts from civic portrait to mortality ledger. His authority isn’t just fame; it’s proximity. He’s telling you the archive is walking around in an aging body, and the clock is loud. The “or rapidly becoming one” addendum is actorly in the best way: wry, unsentimental, aware that the role of witness is not heroic but temporary. The subtext is a plea disguised as a reminiscence: listen now, because the version of Montreal he carries will die twice - once in the city’s transformation, again with its narrators.