Yes. Or rather, both.
Picture one of those cartoons where a character has to make a difficult decision. Suddenly, an angel appears on one of her shoulders and a devil on the other, each offering contradictory advice. Now picture me as the Director but with a Writer on one shoulder and an Editor on the other. Writer and Editor didn’t always get along. Writer was obsessed with presenting the daily routine, note for note, and Editor didn’t want the audience to fall asleep. So, as the director, I compromised.
For every alteration of “the way it actually happened,” I kept details and imposed structures that would preserve authenticity. I strung together sessions that would give a really wide range of what went on in the dungeon, including all of the elements you mentioned, because all of those things do happen. Maybe not every day, but they happen.
Then in production and post I made decisions that would keep REMEDY true to the profession, while engaging the audience. I kept the sessions as episodic as I could, including the before and after, the walks to the room, the cleanup, the commute, etc. Pacing was especially important; I wanted viewers to feel the length of an hour long session and how it feels endure (or fill) the time. I let the tone of the film shift drastically from sequence to sequence. The style modulated from stagey to verité to “documentary” to experimental. And I only chose the sessions that would advance Remedy’s character arc.
So no, the sessions don’t represent the daily routine because I didn’t want to show parts of the industry that I had seen portrayed in other media or something that wouldn’t, as they say in film school, advance the story. I skipped foot worship sessions, tickling and wrestling sessions, outcalls, ass worship sessions, cross-dressing sessions, fat-jiggling sessions (yes, I’m serious), and many more not because I thought they were boring, but because I couldn’t figure out a way for the audience to learn more about Remedy by watching them. And I left out other things because I was chicken-shit, worried about what “America was ready to see.” If I had to do it all over again, I would have made it clear how many times Remedy saw her clients masturbate to orgasm, for example.
At any rate, I don’t think one film can adequately capture professional BDSM completely. REMEDY is just an attempt to put my story, which elapsed over the course of one and a half years, into a digestible two hours. Don’t think I haven’t thought of turning it something larger, say a television show, so I could really capture the daily grind and include other workers’ stories — I would run through my production budget long before I’d run out of material.
(This question was paraphrased from a comment submitted by an audience member after a screening in Kiel, Germany.)