These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

So is the West Coast becoming the best coast for you?

It’s not so much the coast here as it is the water on the coast, so I wouldn’t go that far. But finally, after coming to L.A. practically all of my career, I’ve discovered the single definitive advantage to being here is surfing. It helps, in kind of an ironic way, ground me to be in the water. It just rejuvenates all parts of me and helps denoise my brain and unclutter and reboot my hard drive. And it’s a healthy distraction from everything that’s going on on land in the continental United States right now. Kind of a benevolent addiction.

Let’s surf, then, into “The Goldfinch.” Does it matter to the story that the Hobie onscreen is physically unlike the Hobie in the book?

While there were obvious physical differences described in the book, I don’t think that those things are the most fully impactful in any story that we tell on film. It’s the things that give rise to the goose pimples and the things that spark sentiment and wonder and ideas inside the heart and mind of the audience. And so what I pulled from the character and from the relationship was something entirely beyond the physicality. For me it was about a level of empathy that grief invokes in Hobie, because he too is grieving when he receives this strange waif on his doorstep.

You took up painting for “Basquiat” in 1996. How about furniture restoration to play Hobie?

I was invited down into the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to spend some time with the restorers there. It was an opportunity to immerse myself in the space in which they do their work that is so far removed from the frenetic energy that exists on top of the concrete above their heads.

Then there’s a furniture restorer named Jonathan Burden who works in Queens and taught me some of the specifics about simply touching wood and trying to make an assessment of the character, showing me the smallest details of how his fingers interact with the piece or how he might use saliva to bring out a deeper window onto the quality of the grain. Invaluable.