There have been several variations on this, depending on specifics of your use case.
It sounds like you want motion activated lights, where through some simple mechanism the motion activation can be disabled, and then later, re-enabled. Is that correct? A further subtlety is whether you want to use the motion becoming inactive to turn the lights off. If so, then one way I’ve done that is to simply turn off the light manually as the key to disabling motion-on. Then later, turning it back on and allowing the motion-off automation to turn it off, restores it to normal functioning.
But, there are other ways, and your idea of a Minimote would work very well. Your idea of using a virtual switch would work, that the Minimote would turn on and off to enable and disable the motion logic. You would still need a little custom app and another virtual switch to intercept the motion on / off events and filter them based on your enable /disable condition. Easy to do. Advise if you want help with the code – not much to it.
See the code in this post for an example of a similar use case: Disable lights turn off when motion stops