Papillonis a 1973 film based on the best-selling novel by the French convict Henri Charrière .

This motion picture was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner , starring Steve McQueen as Henri Charrière ("Papillon"), and Dustin Hoffman as Louis Dega . Due to remote locations, this film was quite expensive for the time ($12,000,000), but readily earned more than twice that in the first year of public distribution.

Henri Charriere befriends fellow convict, Louis Dega, while serving a sentence on Devil's Island (a hellish, notorious island prison). He plots his escape.

The petty criminal known as Papillon is unjustly convicted of murder (specifically, murdering a pimp) in the 1930s and sentenced to life imprisonment in a French penitentiary on Devil's Island in French Guiana . He attempts several escapes, which result in many punishments, but after more than a decade (at least seven years of which were spent in solitary confinement as punishment for his escape attempts), he eventually succeeds in escaping to freedom.