Ken Watanabe has just signed with the Weinstein Co. to join John Cusack and Gong Li in Shanghai. According to Variety, Mikael Hafstrom will direct the Hossein Amini screenplay.

Shanghai is a period drama about a American who returns to a corrupt, Japanese-occupied Shanghai four months before Pearl Harbor and discovers his friend has been killed. While he unravels the mysteries of the death, he falls in love and discovers a much larger secret that his own government is hiding.

Filming for Shanghai is scheduled to start next month on location in China.

Shanghai was released in 2011 and stars John Cusack, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, David Morse, Franka Potente, Ken Watanabe, Chow Yun-Fat, Li Gong, Rinko Kikuchi. The film is directed by Mikael Håfström.