This Is Where American Pie 2 Was Filmed
It's easy to dismiss the "American Pie" movies as silly, throwaway teen fare, but there is a certain underappreciated level of craft to them — especially the four entries in the "canon" theatrical series. For how much their exploration of cultural taboos and elaborate gross-out scenarios is talked up (or talked down), the quintessential millennial sex comedies only managed to leave as much of a mark as they did because the people who made them knew what they were doing.
They knew, for example, that effectively disrupting the sensibilities of well-behaved Midwestern suburbia would necessitate an unflagging sense of place: The antics of Jim, Oz, Kevin, Finch, and Stifler only feel as transgressive as they do because we really believe that they're just a bunch of regular Michigan teens. This sense of place becomes especially important in "American Pie 2," as the home-for-the-summer plot keeps the cast mostly out and about around town as opposed to hanging out in school hallways, with at least one memorable location in the form of the Lake Michigan beach house they rent out for the climactic getaway. And yet, mid-budget Hollywood comedy that it is, "American Pie 2" was not really shot anywhere near Michigan.
American Pie 2's Michigan, Spain, and New York are all in the Los Angeles area
Like its predecessor, "American Pie 2" was shot almost entirely in the area surrounding Los Angeles, California. In fact, we only say "almost" because there are a few establishing shots and scenes of the boys driving around Michigan, and those naturally had to be shot second unit in the real locations, according to Movie-Locations.com.
Otherwise, per the same website, everything we see in the movie is really California, beginning with the fictional city of East Great Falls, Michigan, and the characters' homes there. Most of the town, including Jim's (Jason Biggs), Michelle's (Alyson Hannigan), and the two women's houses, consists of various different locations around Long Beach. The lake house scenes, meanwhile, were shot in Paradise Cove, Malibu.
Even the scenes set in Spain, when Oz (Chris Klein) is phoning Heather (Mena Suvari) while she's studying abroad, and New York, from which Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth) calls Jim while on her way to Michigan, were shot in the same general area. "New York" is really downtown Los Angeles with the World Trade Center added into the background, and Heather's Spain is a smartly decorated street in Pasadena, with the Pasadena City Hall standing in for an old European palace (via It's Filmed There).