Politics & Power Quote by Luc Besson

Besson frames history as a street-level heist: the “small people” pull off the impossible while the “specialists” arrive late, clipboard in hand, to explain why it couldn’t happen. Coming from a director whose films often fetishize outsiders with kinetic agency, the line doubles as a worldview and a creative manifesto. The real protagonists aren’t institutions; they’re the extras who suddenly refuse to stay in the background.

The Berlin Wall example isn’t just a convenient monument to people power. It’s a rebuke to managerial politics and expert culture, the idea that change is something scheduled, negotiated, and signed. Besson’s jab that “the specialists didn’t have a clue the day before” weaponizes hindsight: pundits narrate upheaval as inevitable only after it’s already happened. The subtext is less anti-intellectual than anti-complacency. Expertise becomes a costume worn by those who confuse prediction with control.

There’s also a sly move here: he collapses “politicians” and “big guys” into the same inert bloc, implying that power’s primary talent is taking credit. By insisting it was “all the people in the streets,” he strips legitimacy back to presence and risk - bodies showing up, not theories lining up.

Context matters: Besson came of age in a Europe defined by Cold War spectacle and sudden rupture, when televised crowds made geopolitics look startlingly human. He’s tapping that memory to argue that the engine of change is collective impatience, and the real surprise is how often the gatekeepers are the last to notice the gate is already open.