First published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote de la Mancha is an esteemed work which in the centuries since has been the source material for many adaptations. Since the advent of film in the early 20th century, Cervantes' novel has been translated to the silver-screen by several directors of varied backgrounds and nationalities. From Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet's Don Quichotte (1903), Rafael Gil's Don Quixote (1948) and Grigori Kozintsev's Russian adaptation Don Kikhot, the man from la Mancha and his squire have been refashioned in film with varying degrees of success, but often missing one of the central themes of the novel. The metanarrative relationship between the novel's author(s) is a cornerstone to the narrative and a critical aspect for any successful cinematographic adaptation of the oeuvre. The question of authorial identity, duplicity and authorial reliability are the crux of a successful adaptation of Don Quixote de la Mancha. The film Adaptation (2002), written by Charlie Kaufman, is a contemporary work that offers a framework that through parallel meta-referential constructions, manages to create a narrative whose execution could be exemplary for a successful adaptation of Quixote. With this lens, the essentiality of the author and his substitutes in the aforementioned adaptations of Don Quixote will be assessed to determine whether they can really be successful without that facet of the novel.
Key words: Cervantes, Don Quixote, Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman, metanarrative